Natalija Kolářová

* 1940

  • "He told us that they went around the farms where they had cattle and that they took away their cow because they had nothing to eat. But the cow didn't want to go up into those hills, so they wagged her tail to get her to walk a few steps. That was terrible, he said. Sometimes they took eggs, potatoes - they ate what was there. And the farmers were crying, too, that partisans took their food."

  • "We always stopped at a station, we had to get water. And they cooked for us there. There was a kitchen somewhere, and they brought us cocoa, for example, and with that - I don't know where they got it - bread, whether it was ours, I don't remember. But what I do remember is that they always came and they had a big pot and they scooped food for us. We had to have our own cups to eat. They also made soup. And then when we lived in Rýmařov, I remember, Vlastík was still a little boy, and when he played with a train, my grandfather had a little stool by the stove, so it was like a train, and he had to have a pot there. He always put this empty pot on top and we always laughed, because that was the experience of the train. They brought us breakfast in the morning and lunch too. When we stopped at the stations, they had to pump water into the locomotive and stuff... When there was a restaurant, people ran there to buy something. And at the back end of the train there were these cars where they had only straw, and there were soldiers. Maybe they were partisans, I don't know. Once they also ran there to get something. And I met somebody there, or somebody just took me with them. My mother knew about him, he told her he was taking me shopping. And he bought me some candy or something and we went back and the train started moving. And we had time only to jump into their carriage at the end, and it was only then when I saw what a terrible mess they were living in. My mother was freaking out, the next station he took me back to her."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Hejnice, 06.04.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:23:55
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

My father joined the partisans. My mother made up a story that he went to collect wood and disappeared

Graduation photo of Natalija Kolářová, then Tomášková
Graduation photo of Natalija Kolářová, then Tomášková
zdroj: archiv Natalije Kolářové

Natalija Kolářová was born on 27 October 1940 in Ljubljana to a Slovenian mother and Czech father. She spent the first five years of her life in Kranj, Slovenia, where both parents worked in the textile industry. Her father, Jan Tomášek, left in 1944 to fight in the mountains with the Yugoslavian partisans against the German occupiers. After the war, he heard the call for the return of compatriots to Czechoslovakia to the borderlands, from where the German population had to leave. The family settled first in Rýmařov, later her father got a job in a textile factory in Hejnice, where he taught at a night school as an expert in the textile industry. When she was 12 years old, she moved with her younger brother and grandparents to her father in Hejnice, while her mother started a new family in Rýmařov. She completed an eleven-year school in Frýdlant, and worked all her life as an accountant at the National Committee in Raspenava. She started a family. She was able to go to Slovenia to visit her relatives only after the Velvet Revolution. In 2022 she lived in Hejnice.