"Grandpa worked there, he could go there (to the curtain). But then Manfred came to Zwinkendorf and they went to see the monument, which is a short walk to the border, so they went to see Jaroslavice. And of course our father was ploughing there. And now he sees Manfred and shouts, 'Manfred!' He got out of the tractor, but he didn't cross the road, he was standing next to it and they were talking. And the yellow fertilizing plane, the plane from Strachotice, it was flying, it flew over twice, he saw it, so he naturally reported it. Our dad got in so much trouble! My grandmother was angry - Mojmír was already at the agriculture school and Majda at a pedagogical school - that they would get in trouble. Grandmother swore, I swore, poor him. Pepík said: 'For God's sake, doesn't this Jindra have any sense? If he'd stayed in the tractor, that guy wouldn't have seen him from the plane'!"
"There was also a tank coming down from Mikulčice. And as he drove up, there were two old women dressed in skirts. They were Germans and they had a panzerfaust. And when the tank came up, they beat him up. So he still managed to come down, it was on fire. A young soldier jumped out. Then the people who lived opposite said that Němeček's barn was on fire. They caught him and threw him into the burning barn. They say he was still shouting: 'Mamasha!' It wasn't easy."
"And all the young people climbed up the hill, the Svatojánek hill, and watched the village burning around. They said there were already fires in Křepice. There was shooting, but not much. It was nice, so they were there. I still know that they came to the old man there and they said, 'Here, in front of this entrance here, put the sand you had thrown away there again. Keep that door covered. Put a gate on it - so you can see and not be seen.' And it was after five o'clock and suddenly the first Russian rocket launchers came. Now they all started to roll down the Svatojánek hill, I know that Pavla from the Bednářs broke her ankle there. They rolled down and went to the cellars where we spend the night. We still had a walled-off part of it and there was a sort of underpass that the young girls would go there - during a war, it´s bad for them. So Kléma (the older sister of the witness) went there too."
Marie Mühlberger was born Marie Dvořáková on 18 November 1934 in Šitbořice. Her parents were Jaroslav Dvořák and Františka Dvořáková. Her grandfather Eduard Konečný fought in the World War I on the side of Austria-Hungary and was captured on the Eastern Front in 1914. Her uncle Josef Dvořák was a legionary who returned home by train via Vladivostok. In Šitbořice she lived through the World War II on her parents‘ small farm together with her sister Klementýna, 4 years older. During the war, the family had to hand in deliveries in kind and were once investigated by the Gestapo for possible illegal possession of a rifle. At the end of the war, they hid in dug-out shelters in the hill „Svatojánek“, while fierce fighting raged in the village. After the end of the war, her brother was born and she moved briefly to Brno, eventually ending up at the pedagogical school in Břeclav in 1950. After graduating in 1954, she moved to Jaroslavice in the South Moravian border region, where she worked in a children´s home and later as a after-school-club teacher and occasional teacher. In Jaroslavice she found a husband, a German, Jindřich Mühlberger, who belonged to a partially displaced Austrian family. Together they had two children - a daughter Magdalena (*1960) and a son Mojmír (*1962). In 1968 she was expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia for an inappropriate remark. Because of her husband‘s divided family, she occasionally visited Austria, which gave her a glimpse of what life was like behind the curtain. In 2017, she lost her son Mojmír to heartbreak syndrome. In 2025, she was living in Jaroslavice.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
