Julie Košťálová

* 1939

  • “Then the lorries drove up, they were huge. We called them gagarins. They had the cabin on one huge wheel, and then the trailer, two wheels... And when that passed by our house, it rocked in just the same way as the wheels.”

  • “When we moved to Frýdlant, they had to tow the moving van up with a caterpillar. They moved us by caterpillar. Across the garden, which was ruined. They worked there day and night. Say at two in the night, a horn would blare and there’d be stones falling on the roof. Stones this big, really.”

  • “When we came home, my father had to sit on the bed, he held my sister on his lap, I sat right beside him. There was a table near the bed, and they stood a sub-machine gun on it on a kind of tripod and aimed it at us. We weren’t allowed to budge even an inch, and they took out everything they could. It’s one horrible memory, which was in my dreams for a long time. Mum had her pony tail cut, a beautiful long pony tail. When she had that done, my father didn’t say a word and just went away in silence. She had her hair permed. They did that with electricity, with a kind of clamp. She had her pony tail wrapped up in newspaper down at the bottom of the wardrobe. So all her hair was strewn around the floor. As they took everything out of the wardrobe, all the things, everything was on the floor. They took all the clothes, the bedding, they only left us what we wearing at the time. Not even a duvet or a pillow... They left us nothing at all, really. The cottage was full of them. It was such a torrent of men streaming out of the forest.”

  • “The family was broken up by it, actually. Because the Liters, the old woman downhill, the Dudeks next door, then the Stýskals, then the path maker. Those were all family, those were all acquaintances. And then everyone was somewhere else. So it dell apart. And there were no more gatherings at the old woman’s [house] or at Auntie Maruška’s at the Minarčíks... And now they’re all dead, in fact, so...”

  • “I already had my second boy, a baby, he was born in November. So I had to take those two children and leave. You had to open the windows, put out the fire, open the door. We couldn’t leave anything locked, and we had to go all the way down to where the dam is today. A bit further than that, even. We stood there on the road and waited for it to explode. When it did, when they signalled it, we could go home. When I came home, there was a pile of dirt and stones in my living room, the windows were dirty, and all the rooms had disjointed corners. In the living room, which faced the quarry directly, you could actually place your hand into the chinks.”

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    Frýdlant nad Ostravicí, 07.09.2015

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There was no time for tears

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zdroj: archiv Julie Košťálové

Julie Košťálová was born as Julia Chromcová on 19 May 1939 in her parents cottage in the settlement of Ružanec in the Beskid Mountains. The settlement nestled on the slopes of Mount Smrk (Czech for „Spruce“) above the valley of the River Ostravice. Her father was a forest worker in the archiepiscopal forests, her mother kept a small farm and had lived with the hardships of the mountains all her life. In November 1944, aged five, Julie Košťálová experienced a robbery undertaken by a group of armed men; the settlement never discovered if they were partisans or not. In 1950 the family started building a new timbered cottage in Ružanec, which they completed two years later. At the time, Julie Košťálová‘s mother refused to join the Staré Hamry United Agricultural Cooperative, and to punish her the officials did not connect the settlement to the power grid. All the other secluded houses had electric lights, but not in Ružanec. In 1956 the Košťáls were told they would have to abandon their new cottage because the River Ostravice would be transformed by the construction of a dam and the creation of Šance (Czech for „Opportunity“) Reservoir. The witness was studying at the Secondary Medical School in Opava at the time, she graduated in 1957 and became a children‘s nurse. In 1959 she married a gamekeeper, and in 1961 the family with children lived in the place called Šance, where builders were preparing what was to be the biggest gravity dam in Central Europe. The material for the dam was mined directly from the quarry at Šance. Julie Košťálová‘s home was shaken by explosions, during the blast work she had to carry her children to a safe distance in her arms, with stones flying through the air and walls cracking. In 1964 the Košťáls were assigned a flat in a block of flats in Frýdlant nad Ostravicí, as were dozens of other mountain dwellers from the valley between Mount Smrk and Mount Lysá (Czech for „Bald“), whose houses were flooded by the reservoir in 1969. The witness worked as a children‘s nurse her whole life, she visited the children in the settlements and secluded homes in the vicinity of Staré Hamry and Bílá, but her native settlement was destroyed during the construction of the dam and she herself has lived in an apartment house in Frýdlant nad Ostravicí for fifty years. She retired in 1993.