Ludmila Surá

* 1930

  • "You know, it was a complete circus, people who hated communists before, People´s party members, national socialists, democrats hated communists, and suddenly there were a lot of them in the Communist Party and they were all convinced communists. Where did it come from in them, if they hated the communists so much? People who were cursing that communists would hang on branches, on chestnuts and on pear trees, they would hang them everywhere, and suddenly everyone rushed to join the party, where were we?"

  • "My parents went to the cinema and my mom came back alone without dad, crying, saying that they had arrested him, that he looked like one of Heydrich's killers. So, they detained him and arrested him, but then the mayor with the village board and some neighbors guaranteed for my father that he was really Czech and had nothing to do with it. So they let him go, but that evening we were terrified, mum was crying, we were like children worried about dad, that he wouldn't come back to us, well, he did come back.''

  • "I remember that we were across the front in Velký Ořechov. The family was locked in the basement of the school, my grandmother had a building right next to the school, so, it was very close for my aunt Fana and me to go home, cook, take care of the cattle and bring food to the school so that the rest of the family could eat, it was not easy. Once I was walking from lunch, my aunt and I had already cooked, and a German was walking up the hill. He started yelling that he was going to shoot me, cursing me like a tschechische schweine. Teacher Zemánková was standing in the gate, she said to me: 'Lidko, run away, fast, I'll stop the German!' She was running for the commander, otherwise he would have shot up the whole basement while we were there. She really ran into a solid commander, he calmed him down and no one shot us, but it was all very close."

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    Uherský Brod, 23.08.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:55:51
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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Fear is ingrained in our generation

Ludmila Surá during the filming for Memory of Nations, August 23, 2022, Uherský Brod
Ludmila Surá during the filming for Memory of Nations, August 23, 2022, Uherský Brod
zdroj: Memory of Nations

Ludmila Surá, née Krajčová, was born on February 12, 1930 in Uherský Brod to Anastázia Krajčová, née Mizerová, and Jaroslav Krajča, as the second of four children. Her father was an electrician and her mother helped the farmers in the fields. In 1938, her father was called up as part of the mobilization, but the war did not take place and he returned home in a few days. In 1936, Ludmila started going to a general school, then to a middle school. From 1936, she also attended the local Sokol. She was in the third grade when the war started. In 1942, after the assassination of Heydrich, her father was detained for his resemblance to one of the assassins, but was released after a few days. They spent the end of the war with their family in Velký Ořechov. Here she experienced the bombing in the last days of the war and the liberation. In 1944, she went to apprenticeship, trained as a seamstress with Miss Pražanová in Uherský Brod. In the years 1948–1951, she worked as a seamstress, first for the foreman Pančocha, who sewed women‘s clothing, and later, after the nationalization of trades, for the municipality. At the age of nineteen, she started dating Jaroslav Surý, they got married and had three children. In 1959, she returned to the same job, where she worked until her retirement. The husband was a professional soldier, later they got divorced. In 2022, at the time of filming, the witness lived in Uherský Brod.