Zdenka Říhová

* 1932

  • "And they kept going and asking Daddy if he would kill their pig. And he was such a character and kept doing that, but it had to be done at night, everything was covered with straw so that the pig... it screamed, there weren't guns at the time to just shoot it. It had to be stabbed and the pig screamed. Well, if they had heard it, what would it mean? – Straight to the concentration camp! My mother always cried at home, she always said, 'Dad, please, at least sometimes.' And he said, 'And do I do when they're hungry and need to eat?' So he would go slaughter pigs all through the wartime. He did the same with us in Blučina, when we moved to Moravia, he did the same there, he continued. Well, luckily, nothing ever happened to him."

  • "Our house was broken in half, the whole wall collapsed and all. And there were people who had the baskets with the laundry in the basement... my mother had enough gold because she cooked for a doctor and always got gifts... Everything was picked at, everything stolen, so we stayed completely without any means, well so we had to buy everything and there wasn't much... So my parents started in Slovakia, then they started here, then they bombed us, so they started from scratch for the third time."

  • "She lived there, and had a small shop in the square, such a little lady, she was a Jew walking by a cane. Such a small counter, a small shop. So I never saw if she had one leg only or whatever... Well, as we were there with the basket, we talked to her that we would just go collect the chips in that woodshed. And then the door opened and two tall, dark men were standing in there. So what did they do? They started shouting at her, the one he did by taking as she should - it was such a normal counter, not like today's shops, a wooden counter - and she had eggs in a bowl, homemade butter, cottage cheese, and things that one needed, more stuff up on the counter. He came, picked it up like that and threw it all down on the ground. They started there... she was a weak granny; she didn't oppose him. And my sister took my hand and we ran into the woodshed across the yard, where we survived two hours of fear before they left.”

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    Písek, 03.03.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 01:00:18
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
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My parents started from scratch three times

Zdenka Říhová in 2020
Zdenka Říhová in 2020
zdroj: PNS

Zdenka Říhová, née Rožnovská, was born on July 16, 1932 in Michalovce, Slovakia. After the establishment of the independent Slovak state in March 1939, anti-Czech sentiments intensified in Slovakia, and so the witness with her parents and three siblings fled to Moravia. Even before that, she experienced an attack on a defenceless Jewish saleswoman in Slovakia right in her shop. The family eventually settled in Blučina near Židlochovice. The witness‘s father made a living as a butcher and helped his neighbours with the slaughter of pigs secretly. At the end of the war, Blučina became the target of bombing and one of the bombs hit the Rožnovský house. In addition, someone stole all their family gold. After the war, Zdenka married a soldier. She then moved all her life according to where her husband was transferreded. She lived for some time in Terezín, Pardubice, Prague, České Budějovice and eventually settled in Písek.