Zdeňka Králová

* 1935

  • “The next morning my dad decided - it was a risk, of course - because my mum was pregnant, I was ten years old, so he took us, and we fled the house. There weren’t houses opposite us then, just fields, and there were some garden houses built there, and gardeners. Dad just took us, and we went there, except there was no one in the house, so we sat down in the kitchen and waited it out there until 9 May. And then suddenly the people from the house appeared and told us we had a lucky scrape, that they’d seen the Germans as well, that they were coming towards them. They’d broken in... left the flat in chaos. Well, and they’d legged it into the fields. They hid in some straw, and they said they’d seen us come, but that they couldn’t shout at us because the Germans were just leaving there that very moment, as we were entering from the other side. So if it had been just a moment sooner, they’d have shot us.”

  • “People told us that something was going on, so the whole house got together. Everyone had a cellar on the right or the left side, so everyone went to the side where they had the cellar, and we were on the righthand side, and the disaster happened on the lefthand side. Well, and they simply herded all of the people there out into the garden, where they shot them. My friend the classmate, his five-year-old sister - and their mum survived by pretending to be dead, but she didn’t come out of it easy either because she lost a leg.”

  • “The way it was on our right side of the house, it was thanks to Mrs Soukupová, who was the caretaker of our house. She was born in Germany, and she spoke perfect German, so she started negotiating with the Germans, saying there were only mothers there, she didn’t say there were also men there, but that there were only mothers, children. Well, and my mum was pregnant, about eight months with child, so she said there was a pregnant lady there as well, so they relented and went away, they didn’t enter our part, but those others... those fifteen or so people, they shot them dead. I heard that my friend, my friend’s sister, they were to have apparently gouged her eyes out alive.”

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    byt paní Králové - Spořilov, 02.11.2016

    (audio)
    délka: 24:19
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
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No one ever explained why it happened to be us

Zdeňka Králová in childhood
Zdeňka Králová in childhood
zdroj: PNS

Zdeňka Králová, née Petržílková, was born on 26 April 1935 in Prague-Vysočany. In 1937 she mover with her parents into a small flat in Úsobská Street in Prague-Pankrác. During World War II members of the SS occupied the school pavilions at the other end of the garden. At the end of the war, on 6 May 1945, SS units broke into their house and murdered their neighbours, who were hiding in the cellar. Zdeňka and her parents were only saved by chance. After a while they fled the house and hid in a garden shed. A total of 51 people were murdered in Úsobská Street. After graduating from secondary school, Zdeňka found an office job at a gardening centre. She married and moved away. She does not visit the streets where she experienced the massacre.