“There was a merchant in the village and we would go to his shop often. The shop was on a hill. In the summer, there always used to be a great water shortage. We had a well running down twelve or fifteen meters into a rock. We always had water even when the others didn’t. The merchant once asked my mother if we could give him some water. My dad said sure, you should give water even to your enemy. Our neighbor from across the street probably gave us away. The Gestapo came to our home. We were hiding hundreds of kilos of grain, a lot of lard and sugar in the attic. If they had found it, we’d have been sent to jail right away and spend an eternity there. Luckily, my mother spoke perfect German and that already was a good starting point. The older Gestapo agent noticed that my father had an amputated leg so he asked him how it came about. My dad told him that he had fought at the Masuria lakes in Poland. The Gestapo man said: ‘me too!’ So finally there was no search, they just chatted for a while, then they saluted and left.”
“There was a Jewish family, the Vogels, who fled to America and became incredibly rich there. Their mother stayed in Kralovice. She was such a tiny little human being. Her sons offered our government to pay for a sewage treatment plant for Prague so that they wouldn’t have to build the dam. Our government generously refused the offer. They then took my mother to New York, where they lived. Once they had a big party of the upper one hundred thousand. They told my mother. Those wealthy people would go to the Canary Islands and other tourist centers and they were telling the tales about it. She reared up and said: ‘but you have not seen Kralovice, yet’.”
“There were sad stories in the life of my mother. We weren’t Catholics. We were members of the Unity of the Czech Brethren. In Kralovice, there was a Catholic cemetery and because František wasn’t a Catholic they wanted to put him next to the wall of the cemetery among the suicides. They even wouldn’t borrow us a stretcher. Finally, the gravedigger showed mercy and my mom was able to have her way at the office. So finally they buried him. But at least they didn’t borrow us the stretcher. My mother thus gave her new sheet, wrapped him in it and that’s how they buried him.”
“Being the year of birth 1924, I was supposed to be assigned to a forced-labor brigade in Germany. We were going to work in Magdeburg, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Berlin… President Hácha presented the 1924 generation to Hitler as a gift. However, we had connections, we knew a couple of doctors. I was supposed to wait for the transport in a prison but my dad had some friends among the gendarmes and they let me stay at home – he promised them that I would not run away. At night, we went on foot to Ledeč because we couldn’t use the bus. My mom told me that I looked too healthy and that they would certainly find me fit for work in Germany. So we decided to try the student trick with the chalk. I don’t remember how much chalk I ate but when my mom saw me she said that she got scared because I was so pale. The doctor checked me and he attested that I was only capable of working here in Bohemia.”
Dagmar Hanzlová, née Štoková, was born in 1924 in Prague. At the age of 6, her family moved to Dolní Kralovice in the Vysočina region, where Dagmar spent her childhood and youth. She thus witnessed the sad fate of the Jewish community living in the region. Most of the Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps where they lost their lives. In 1944 she managed to evade a transfer to forced labor in Germany by feigning illness. Instead of having to work as a slave laborer in the Reich, she was placed in the kitchen of an underground factory in Dolní Loučky nearby Tišnov which produced the fuselage and engines for the fighter plane Messerschmitt Me 109. In 1946, Mrs. Dagmar married Vlastimil Hanzl, who took part in the Battle for France as the soldier of the 1st telegraphic battalion of the Czechoslovak foreign army in 1940. In the course of one of the campaigns, he was injured and captured by the Germans. However, he managed to escape from the POW camp and made it to his sister’s place in Dolní Kralovice, where he went into hiding for some time and where he also met his future wife. After the end of the war, they moved together to Opava. The town of her youth, Dolní Kralovice, had to make way to the construction of the Švihov water dam which was built on the Želivka River.
