Hana Šebková

* 1931

  • “A number of new people came here after the war. Some were called gold-diggers. Not everything was as it should be, but they were all happy that the war was over and that the republic would be re-established. But it lasted until February 1948. Dad was then to join the cooperative. Dad and grandpa were both paying their insurance in the Živnostenská Bank. When the bank became nationalized, grandpa, who was already retired, was not eligible for retirement allowance. Dad was forty-five. As a free trader he had been paying his insurance since the age of fourteen, and suddenly he was also told that he was not eligible for retirement allowance. He had to work for twenty-five years more. He had to work until seventy-one in order to complete the twenty-five years and be eligible for a retirement allowance.”

  • “In March 1945 a death march was passing through Tanvald. I was just in my friend’s house which was by the main road and we could hear dogs barking madly and shouts in German. We were scared by it. It was a death march from concentration camps. Concentration camps were being liquidated and they thus made the prisoners walk to Rýnovice, where there was some camp as well. It was something terrifying and I will never forget that. What people can do to other people… Prisoners pushed two-wheeled carts and others were holding one onto another, leaning on their elbows; they wore wooden clogs and striped rags, and they could walk no more, they hung onto another, and when somebody’s legs could serve no longer, they threw him onto that wagon. We were on the first floor and from the window we could see that people on the wagon were still moving. It was horrible.”

  • “We had a German neighbour, a baker who came here in place of a Czech baker. The name of his family was Preiss and they had no children. Baker Preiss befriended my dad, who could speak German well. They were bringing shoes for repair to us and they talked. One day Mr. Preiss told dad that he was an anti-fascist. Dad asked him how come that he was not on the front. Mr. Preiss said that Hitler would not get him. One day he came to dad and he said: ‘Mr. Dlouhý, the next time you want to listen to the broadcast from London, please, come to me. I am a German, and I live on the first floor. If some stupid fascist walks by your house and hears that you are listening to the London radio, that would be your end.’ Dad was surprised that Mr. Preiss knew that we were listening to the London broadcast. Mr. Preiss said that the opening theme of the London broadcast could be heard from our apartment. He thus said to dad to come to Mr. and Mrs. Preiss because they were listening to London as well. But they were Germans, and they lived on the first floor, and the radio could not be heard from there.”

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    Tanvald, 02.08.2015

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When people treat one another like humans, then it does not matter what nationality they are

Hana Šebková 2015
Hana Šebková 2015

Hana Šebková, née Dlouhá, was born on May 15, 1931 in Tanvald into the family of Ota and Olga Dlouhý. Her father worked as a shoemaker. She had brother Jiří, who was three years older. When the Sudetenland territory was annexed to Germany in autumn 1938, Germans closed down Czech schools in Tanvald and the parents thus sent Hana and her brother Jiří to stay with family friends in the country‘s interior. Half a year later, when a one-class Czech school opened in Tanvald, the children returned to their parents. Hana remembers the coexistence of Czechs, Sudeten Germans and Reich Germans during the war as well as the fates of individual neighbours. Ethnically motivated hatred nearly cost Hana her life when a boy from Hitlerjugend attempted to drown her. When he was fourteen years old, Hana‘s brother was drafted to do forced labour, but his father refused and he was to go to prison for that. Thanks to an intervention of his German colleagues - shoemakers - this eventually did not happen. The family Dlouhý did not harbour any prejudice and they made a distinction between Germans and Nazis. However, when Hana‘s mother witnessed a death march of people from a concentration camp in 1945, she suffered a nervous breakdown and for some time she gave in to hatred against Germans. Hana married and her daughter Hana was born in 1952. Hana Jr. later became a successful linguist, translator, pedagogue and an expert in Roma studies.