My father was in service of Austrian nobility
Hedvika Köhlerová was born on the 15th of May in 1924 in the community of Liborča (today Nemšová) in Slovakia as Hedvika Sprosečová. Her family roots are very colourful and reflect the multi-national Austro-Hungarian empire. Her grandfather, Giovanni Battista Pisetta was Italian, her grandmother, Caroline Elisabeth Wetzer, was a German from the Sudeten. Hedvika grew up in Slovakia with her mother Silvie and her father was a Czech, Arthur Sproseč. She herself feels as a Czech, she has been living in Prague since 1945. A part of her family stayed in Slovakia, other family members were forced to move to Bohemia during the rule of the Slovak State (a client country of Nazi Germany, 1939 – 1945). The history of her family is tightly interwoven with the large Brumov estate which lay on both sides of the Moravian-Hungarian border [Moravia being a separate historical, geographic and political entity] which was established by an Austrian beer tycoon, Anton Dreher, and which was later managed by Countess Edeltrud von Rainer zu Harbach. Most men in Hedvika’s family were foresters in service of the Countess, Hedvika herself worked during the last few years of war as her secretary in Brumov. During the Prague Uprising, her sister’s husband died. After WWII, the witness married into a Czech family of musicians. Her husband, Jan Köhler, was a violinist in the National Theatre orchestra. His father, Jan Köhler the Elder, was fired from work after the 1948 Communist coup d’état because he was a Social Democrat and refused to join the Communist Party. After getting married, Hedvika became a housewife, cared for her children, studied languages and was active in the Protestant church. The talent for music continues in the next generations; witness’ daughter is active in music, she used to teach guitar, her granddaughter is a violinist.