Marta Sturt

* 1928

  • “The girls’ boarding school stood on a bit of a hill, there was a boys’ boarding school under. They had a large playground which we saw as we were on the hill and they were under. We saw the hostages every day who were imprisoned there and they were let out for an hour every day to get some fresh air and they had to walk round and roiund. Once Sister called me and said that I’ll go there with another girl and that we will walk along the fence, talk a lot and loudly, and that we are not to look at the boys’ school and a fence, just on the path, and talk a lot and laugh. Her father was imprisoned there, he was one of the hostages, he was a journalist. The Sister wanted that he hear the voice of his little daughter to cheer him up, to give him strength.”

  • “We were interrogated threetimes, each month, they asked moreless the same questions, justin different ways, they took notes and compared them, they wanted to know whether we indeed wanted to escape or whether we were crooks who wanted to get abroad for free. They did not notify us in advance, they announced it with the loudspeakers: ‘Control! Come!’ Then there were health checks, they were also announced in the last minute. All women stood in one row, we had to undress and wait our turn. They did not have to do it in such a way, I don’t know why they did it this way.”

  • “The Church tried hard that the Czechs do not get Germanised, so that they speak nice Czech. That was a triumph, she gave me that book. [Original unclear] I made a beautiful presentation, I learned it by heart. I went to the board and recited it. Everyone listened and then they started clapping, they stood on the tables and shouted. All of them were glad that I showed that he talked nonsense. That was the best time of my life, that adulation. There were forty children who made noise, stamped their feet, they tried to be as loud as possible. Then, the Headmaster called me and told me: ‚You know, it is okay to express your opinion but you need to do it in a slightly different way.’”

  • “He told us there was a brook, that we need to cross it to get to the other side. We ran across a meadow, across that brook, and I fell in the water, obviously. Soon, we found a path and on that path, a German border guard stood. They let us go and told us that we would arrive to a building where they would sign us up, give us some food and send us to some sort of camp. So we did that but at that building, there was a lady who was a German from the Sudetenland who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia. She disliked Czechs. She gave us train tickets and some food, sandwiches, and that we need to hurry to the station to catch the train. We came to the station, there was no-one, not a single soul, no train. It was cold, we walked there and back and decided to eat the food. We unwrapped the bag, there were sandwiches with jam. We took a bite and there was salt in them, she put a layer of salt on the jam.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Melbourne, Distanční natáčení, 18.10.2022

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    délka: 39:51
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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    Melbourne, Distanční natáčení, 18.10.2022

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    délka: 39:06
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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    Melbourne, Distanční natáčení, 18.10.2022

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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    Melbourne, Distanční natáčení, 19.10.2022

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    Melbourne, Distanční natáčení, 28.10.2022

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    délka: 01:47:04
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When she was running away to Germany, she fell in a stream. She managed to escape the border guards.

Marta Sturt at the age of nineteen. Graduation photograph
Marta Sturt at the age of nineteen. Graduation photograph
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Marta Sturt, née Winklerová, was born on the 14th of April in 1928 in Frýdlant nad Ostravicí. She and her sister Marie were raised by their grandparents, their father worked as an accountant in the Vítkovice iron works and he and their mother lived in Ostrava. When she was eleven, she started attending a school at the Congregation of Sister of St. Cyril and Methodius in the Masaryk neighbourhood inBrno. In 1939, the Germans took over their school. Marta witnessed air raids in Brno, she secretly transported flour bought at the black market, she saw the SS officers arrest people. Her cousin Pavel Tofel was a pilot at the RAF. After the war, she finished school and in 1948, she enrolled at the Institute for Modern Languages in Brno. A neighbour from the dormitory snitched on her that she listens to English radio. In October 1948, she crossed boundariesto Germany and she spent eight months in a refugee cam. In July 1949, she made a trip from Italy to Melbourne on The Nelly. She worked in Darwin and later, she settled in Melbourne. In1957, she married Miroslav Šťovíček and in the 1960‘s, they changed their surnames to Sturt. She had two sisters. Marta never saw her parents again and her sister Marie visited her in Australia only after 1989 [revolution]. In 2022, she lived in Melbourne.