Josefa Povolná

* 1924

  • "We went and looked for where we lived, that pub in Esslingen. And you know, what I found? Even the factory that stood there before. A lady came out, carrying something to the trash can. I said: 'Alena, ask her if the factory was there, it must have been in that place.' And she says: 'Yeah, there was a factory here and the factory owner converted it into apartments and let the master live there. But he died a year ago.' I would have liked to see him, the master. He was quite nice. He always brought us the paycheck and was already smiling and saying, 'I'm carrying the money!' Well, in German."

  • "They put us up in a pub there, a small pub like that. And he, the boss who owned the factory, they also went there for food and took us with them. He was rather a fair-play guy and he probably not in favor of Hitler, I do not think he was."

  • "We said that the war would soon be over, that we would go home. And that one Ukrainian woman, when there was an air raid, we were there in the boiler room, and she tells me that they weren't. They didn't want to go home because they were sending them to Siberia and the Russians were afraid that they would be sent to Siberia. You know, when the Germans were there, when they invaded Russia, what was available to eat, everything went to the Germans and they had nothing to eat. Because one of the Russians told me that they exchanged gold rings for a head of cabbage."

  • "We worked there on the machines and on the milling machines and drilling machines (drills), and all kinds of things like that, and one girl was putting it into boxes. Otherwise our salaries were similar to what we earned here in the Czech Republic, but we had to pay for an apartment, food, and other extras I do not even remember now. So we had almost nothing left of our earning.”

  • "I was 20 years old in the 44th, and then there was the minister Moravec, who gave us, that whole year, as a gift to Hitler, so that we had to go to work in Germany."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Tábor, 02.10.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:59:26
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

A minister called Moravec gave our year as a gift to Hitler and we had to go to work in Germany

Josefa Povolná at the age of 18 in 1942
Josefa Povolná at the age of 18 in 1942
zdroj: archív pamětnice

Josefa Povolná, née Lososová, was born on February 12, 1924 in Dobronice near Bechyně to a poor family, the last of five siblings. The father, a polisher, commuted to work in Prague, where he had a more secure job and a higher income. She experienced the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia when she was fifteen, i.e. just after finishing primary school. Soon after, she started working at the Bechyně spa. German children lived there during the protectorate. In 1944, as the witness says, the collaborating protectorate minister Emanuel Moravec „donated“ her entire year to Hitler for work. From March of that year, she was fully deployed in an engineering company in Esslingen near Stuttgart. Unlike most other witnesses, he does not remember that time badly. A large part of the Germans there, including the boss at the factory, behaved very politely towards her and her Czech friends, they did not show their superiority in any way, as was usual elsewhere. On the contrary, the witness claims that some of them were very accommodating and fair. The boss at the factory willingly let her back to Bohemia for the funeral of a friend from the village, who was totally deployed in Graz and died there during the bombing. She did not return to Germany, however, because Stuttgart, as one of the industrial centers, was a frequent target of air raids and Allied troops were approaching it. However, Josefa Povolná could not forget the total commitment. At the age of 80, she (thanks to her niece who married in Germany) returned to the places where she worked in 1944 and looked for her old acquaintances there. She managed to meet their descendants and find the pub where she lived during the war, as well as the site of the factory, now converted into apartments. She spent her last years in the G-centre in Tábor.