Anna Krpešová

* 1930

  • "Our cottage was just an ordinary, low-rise building. There was a loft upstairs, where they would store hay. And at the end of the house there was a slaughterhouse, a shop, and this little room my father kept heated. And he had tripe soup ready on the oven or some other soup. And when people came from far away, he would offer them warm soup, I remember that. It was always warm in that little room, but not in the shop. We still had the old icehouse. They used to chop ice on the river in February, then they would take it home. It was quite an event. It was usually freezing in February. Now the ice houses wouldn't stand a chance because the river just doesn't freeze."

  • "The Russians came and saw that the Germans had fled, that there was a kitchen left with ready-made sirloin steak. They wanted something sour in it, so my mother brought them sauerkraut. And they dumped the raw sauerkraut into the sirloin. When my mother saw it, she got all mad about it, I remember. Then they got drunk and my father took us, me and Stázinka, our maid, to grandpa's because he was worried about us. I was fifteen and Stázka was about eighteen. She was cute, healthy girl. We were scared because they were drunk, but I don't remember being bothered. But it was terrible."

  • "I remember when the Germans occupied us in March. I won't forget that either. We stood on the steps in front of our house, we could see the main square quite well. They were coming from Frýdlant, heading towards Slovakia. They didn't clear the snow from the roads back then. There was half a meter of snow or maybe even more. They came in sidecars, in those motorbikes with a sidecars. They were tilted to the side. I can still see those Germans. I was so scared of them. And later, the Gestapo also came to us, because there was Gestapo at Bílá and at Hamry, at Ostravačka [Ostravačka Hotel], too."

  • "Every time there was an air raid, we all went outside to watch. And people from Ostrava who used to go to the shelter in Ostrava would come to spend summers in our apartment in Staré Hamry. They also watched the raids while in Hamry. And then they bombed Ostrava. It was at noon. We were all outside, and we saw the squadron coming. We knew it was the Americans. There was smoke coming from the back of one of the planes. And then I saw them bailing out at Smrk [Smrk Mountain]. I'm sure that it was at noon, because we were running from lunch. Mom was upset, but then she came out too. We could see Smrk from our house when we came out. And we saw SS men in cars as well heading in that direction. They got many of them [the airmen] that day. The pilot was the last one to bail out, his parachute didn't open and he got killed. He was buried at the Hamry cemetery. On All Saints' Day we brought him flowers. But then they dug him up, exhumed him and took him away."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Ostrava, 24.05.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:34:32
  • 2

    Ostrava, 29.05.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:21:18
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Her father was a famous butcher. When the communists took his trade away, he hanged himself

Anna Krpešová, around 1950
Anna Krpešová, around 1950
zdroj: archiv Anny Krpešové

Anna Krpešová, née Duží, was born on 11 October 1930 in Staré Hamry in the Beskydy Mountains. Her father was a butcher and a sausage maker who ran a popular butcher shop in the mountain village. During the war he helped to feed the partisans. When the communists took over his business after February 1948, he committed suicide. Anna Krpesova trained as a seamstress and attended a housekeeping school. After her father‘s death, she worked with her mother and grandfather on the small farm that remained in the family. After her marriage to Václav Krpeš, a teacher, she moved to Ostravice. She experienced the building of the Šance reservoir on the Ostravice River in the 1960s. Because of the dam, bith her family home and the center of Staré Hamry ended up under water. She and her husband raised three children. For many years she worked in Ostravice as a schoolmistress. After 1989, she co-founded the Civic Democratic Party branch in Ostravice. In 2023, she lived in a retirement home in Frýdlant nad Ostravicí.