Marie Králová

* 1932

  • "We could see fire from our window. The Lundwall settlement was burning not far from us. There was a big sand factory where Lundwall had his villa and houses for his employees. I don't know if it was a bomb that set it on fire. It was 1944, my brother František had just been born. Daddy decided that we would go to a friend's house in the Vršovice forestry house and went to my uncle's to get a car. My mother didn't want to, but my father came, loaded us up and we went. There were already several families from Kylešovice in Vršovice, it was a big house. We children had a good time there. We played games and went blueberry picking. Once we went up on the hill above the forestry and saw phosphorus bombs falling on Opava. Opava was on fire! That was probably the biggest disaster for Opava. It was damaged a lot. The bombs caught fire as soon as they hit the ground. We still remained in Vršovice then. One morning we woke up and the whole area up to the forest was full of Germans, cars, guns. My mother immediately sent my sister take her bicycle and get my father."

  • "From the attic of our house, we watched Ostrava at night as shiny trees were falling from the sky. This was to give the planes a better illumination of Ostrava. We hadn't had any big fights yet. Another time, when my friend and I were in our attic, we heard American planes. It was such a beautiful sound. We were both looking out of the window and suddenly bombs started dropping not far from us. I had never experienced that in my life. The pressure wave threw us off and pinned us to the ground. The planes then continued to bomb the hospital in Opava. My neighbour was in the laundry room with her little daughter when the bomb hit and killed them both. Their bodies were on display in the former Orel hall that was used as a church. The church was no longer standing, it was destroyed. Planes came in occasionally and some bombs fell. But in the beginning we didn't perceive the war that way."

  • "I wanted to talk about schools. When World War II started, the Germans created a new German school in Kylešovice. Our parents got the permission for us to go to the old Czech one. The headmaster was a German named Kindlar from Kylešovský hill. When we met him, we had to raise our hand and say 'Heil Hitler'. But we didn't want to, so we tried not to meet him. And when it was Adolf Hitler's birthday on the 20th of April, we had a celebration in the Orel (Eagle) Hall. By then Orel had been cancelled. Our headmaster came there in an orange Nazi uniform."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Ostrava, 14.06.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:46:21
  • 2

    Ostrava, 26.06.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:37:11
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Hold on to the truth at all times, because a lie has punishment already in itself

Six years old Marie Králová in portrait photo
Six years old Marie Králová in portrait photo
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Marie Králová was born on 14 November 1932 in the then independent village of Kylešovice near Opava to Anna and František Jelen. Her parents supported her relationship with Sokol, as they did with her two years older sister Eliška. Plans for the construction of the Sokol hall were thwarted by the Second World War. It disrupted the cultivated relations between the local Czechs and Germans within seven years. The decisive moment came when seven-year-old Marie Králová saw the marching Hitler youth from the local German school. Her worst experiences came at the end of the war, when she and her family and her newborn brother František were hiding first in the woods near Vršovice and later at home in the cellar. After the war, she completed her missing primary education and graduated from a two-year business school. From 1949 she worked as an accountant and later as head accountant of the district enterprises Živena and Restaurace a jídelny (Restaurants and Canteens). At the end of the 1950s she travelled through Czechoslovakia with two friends on a Pionýr motorcycle. She got married and has two children. At the time of recording in 2023 she was living in a house in her native Kylešovice.