Milada Sovová

* 1933

  • “Trucks and cavalrymen on horses came to us from Chýnov. At the tavern U Beránků the cooks were sitting in the courtyard, in the yard, and we went there to help peel potatoes. They were always making borsch. We had them staying at our house too. They came all of the sudden. The door opened up and a couple of high ranking guys came up to us, some officers. We had them there for about fourteen days. There were meadows in front of our house, and a creek flowed there. The soldiers with their carriages washed and bathed in it. In the forest facing Chýnov they made beds to sleep on out of rounded logs. Down below as well as up above. We had them there for fourteen days and grandma cooked for them, fed them. As thanks for letting them stay with us, they gave my brother an enormous roll of material for making dresses and coats. Then they got some orders and had to leave, apparently to Prague.”

  • “Near us between Turovac and Planá there was a prison camp. There were maybe eleven wooden barracks there. They brought young people there who were supposed to go work in factories in Germany, but when they rejected the offer or tried to flee, they were sent to this prison camp as punishment. They drove through Turovec to Chýnov to a quarry where they were supposed to work in a lime works. Others worked in the forest where they cut down trees. In the evening they shuttled them back to the prison camp through Turovec. Us kids, who lived right next to each other in Turovec, carried bread and apples around with us in our pockets. When they were riding in the truck to the prison camp, we could see that the driver blinked his lights to let us know we could toss them the bread. We threw it to them and they caught it. There were armed guards with them, but when they were the good ones, they just nodded in approval.”

  • “I went to work really early in the morning to the barracks, I crossed the street toward the lyceum toward Jordán. There was one tank after the other driving there, all the way to the barracks. I went towards them and they told me that I couldn’t go any further, that it was already full of soldiers, and to go home. So I went home and woke my husband up so he’d get the barracks fast, that the Soviets were here. Then, three days later, they came back. They just ordered us to stay inside, but, so we wouldn’t be afraid, they would have to stay with us in the barracks. Five days later they came back to check on us and then they went back again. The Soviets were all over the place, inside and out, but they say that nothing else happened. Then they left Tábor.”

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    Tábor, 22.01.2019

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We threw bread to the prisoners in the work camp in Planá nad Lužnicí

Milada Sovová, née Růžičková, was born on April 1933 in Turovec in Southern Bohemia, where she lived with her brother, parents, and grandparents in a cottage house with a small family farm. It was there where went through the war. She remembers, as a child, throwing bread to the inmates in the nearby prison camp in Planá nad Lužnicí while they were working in a stone quarry. In 1945, in the local tavern U Beránků, they also bore witness to the liberation of the interned orphans – the so called Svatobořické children – who lost their parents during the Heydrich reprisals, the children of resistance fighters. In summer 1947 Milada’s mother suddenly died during a period of drought, thus she was no longer able to continue going to school for the new family situation. In 1952 she married the soldier by profession Jan Sova and they raised three children together. They lived in Tábor and Milada worked in the barracks as a cook. She remembers when, in 1968, the barracks was occupied by the Warsaw Pact soldiers. She led a family life, with no interest in politics, and neither she nor her husband was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. However, she happily welcomed the events of November 1989.