Jarmila Slabyhoudová

* 1923

  • "When we were in the first year of the family school (1938–1939, editor's note), actually the textbook, it was during the republic, so I know that history, the principal told us: 'Take a ruler and a pen or a pencil and I will tell you which sentences you have to tick.' 'And you don't have to cross it out too much. Just faintly so that it can be read,' is what he meant. But they also arrested him, and then I learned that he died in a concentration camp."

  • “Then they visited people during the day – and at night, at night they went and looted. What they gave during the day, they took other things. I remember how at night they suddenly banged on the door, on the door, my father went to open, and the Russian soldier pushed my father away from the door and entered the apartment. Mom was in bed, so he went over to her, started pulling the duvet off her, well, it was such a horror."

  • "Because actually people, as soon as the war ended and the Germans were displaced from the border area, Czechs who didn't have a house here moved to the border area. So, the people who used to work for us, actually a lot of them moved to the border area there, and we didn't have any people at all to work on the farm and in the fields. So the employment office assigned people to my father, and they were Prague Germans who lived in Prague before they were displaced. And they actually always had to be accompanied, and that's what I did, that someone who was ordered to be deported was always accompanied to Prague, so we went to Prague and I handed them over here. So that's how they were displaced gradually.'

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha - Čakovice, 30.09.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 01:33:06
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Praha - Čakovice, 14.12.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 39:34
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I was looking forward to living again in truth and without pretense

Jarmila Kettnerová; 1941
Jarmila Kettnerová; 1941
zdroj: archive of the witness

Jarmila Slabyhoudová, née Kettnerová, was born on July 16, 1923 in Chloumek near Mělník into the family of a householder as the middle of three children. In 1930, she joined the elementary school in Mělník, where she also graduated from the Burgher school. In the years 1938–1941, she attended a family school in Mělník. In 1938, she experienced the migration of Czechs from the Sudetenland to the midland. During the Second World War, the family had to pay precisely defined levies from their farming to the occupying power, but at the same time it protected them from forced deployment. After graduating from the family school, Jarmila cooked for the family and employees on the farm. In May 1945, the sister of the witness moved with her family from Prague to Chloumek to escape the fighting during the Prague Uprising. Jarmila remembers the liberation by the Red Army, which distributed food to people during the day and looted at night, and the bombing of Mělník on May 9, 1945. After 1945, she witnessed the Germans‘ expulsion, and worked briefly at the municipal office in Ústí nad Labem, where she distributed food stamps. She got married in 1946 and had two children. After the communists took power, the Kettners donated their land to the Mělník state estate, which they were neighboring, and thus were not forced to join the unified agricultural cooperative (JZD). In 1952, Jarmila‘s brother Josef Kettner was sentenced to eight months in Jáchymov for helping two boys try to emigrate from the country. Jarmila Slabyhoudová moved with her husband to Čakovice, where she worked in the school cafeteria from 1956 until her retirement. In 1968, she witnessed the arrival of Soviet troops in Čakovice. In November 1989, she and her husband participated in demonstrations in the center of Prague. She is a widow and lives in Čakovice.