“A Jewish family had lived in that house. The sons went to Palestine and their parents died, I think. They had moved out of the house while the war was still underway. A German family then lived in the flat under us. The Russians were already in Olomouc. The water was not running, nothing was working. People in the adjacent house were unable to get out of the basement, and so they dug a tunnel into our basement in order to get out. My brother was helping them and his body was all black and dirty and the Russians were already here. Even before that, in Zeyer Street, they had no neighbours in the house. There was a wall and it got hit by a bomb. It was in the place where my brother used to go to play chess with one man who lived there. My brother never went to that basement. He was always somewhere where he was not supposed to be. I always had to make him get out of somewhere. At that time, Russians were already in the house but we didn’t know it. I was the family slave, and so I went to fetch water so that my brother, who was dirty from all the digging, would be able to wash himself. He had a big washbasin in the large kitchen, and I went to bring water there for him. As he was washing himself, all of a sudden two Mongolians – Russians stormed into our flat. My brother was naked, and my sister and mother hid themselves in the maid’s room, and I remained there at the mercy of these two Russians. They stole my brother’s watch, they stole the last salami that we had in the pantry, and bread, too. The bread was then lying on the street in the morning. They kept insisting that I go to bed with them. I could speak a bit of Russian. My mother-in-law was Russian. And so I kept telling them that we were sleeping in the basement and not in the room there. The beds were made up. I was showing them the whole flat. They had rifles and they were small, dark, dirty and ugly. I was thinking what to do. The flat was on the third floor, I wasn’t able to jump out of the window, and so I talked them out of it. It took me quite a long time to convince them that I did not sleep in those beds and that I did not go there and that I was sleeping in the basement. I eventually got them out of the flat, but then I found out that they had been sent to me on purpose by the renegades.”
“My brother was in Postoloprty. He thought that Moravia had been already liberated. There was a rumour like this, and so he ran away. These camps were controlled by the Todt organization. There was no barbwire anymore. In the morning they were just taking them to Most to work and then back to Postoloprty to the camp. And in April 1945 they ran away because they thought that Moravia had already been liberated. But the Russians were standing here behind Ostrava and the front was not moving. He was not able to return to Olomouc, because he was 1,90 metres in height and he was awfully conspicuous. At that time I had been working in Skrben for half a year, the German company was located there. There were sappers. Eighteen-year-old boys who were digging trenches. I made him hide among them. Nobody knew that he was my brother. Thus I hid him there until the end of the war since he was unable to go to Olomouc because he would have gotten arrested there immediately.”
“Then we had to flee from Šternberk. It was during the mobilization when the soldiers were coming back from the borders. Because of that, it took us the whole night to get from Šternberk to Olomouc. We took only what we were able to carry in our hands. We owned a five-room flat and the furniture has not reached us. Part of the furniture was carried on a train car to Slovakia, and another part was in a movers’ wagon in a horse-drawn carriage. The carriage waited in Šternberk and it was just shortly before the occupation. Father got a coachman and a pair of horses from the general. They walked to Šternberk and at least they managed to bring this one wagon with our furniture here from Šternberk. When we moved here we didn’t have anything. The house in Olomouc was just about to be completed, and our father had that much foresight that he had secured an apartment for us in Zeyer Street already in September. The staircase there didn’t even have railings yet. The flooring had not yet been laid in all the flats. We were among the first tenants there. We slept on borrowed mattresses. The first days were horrible. We had nothing. Such were our beginnings in Olomouc. I cannot even express it. All the other people were still normal people, but we were refugees.”
“In 1938, we were wearing badges with national colours to school, and at the same time, the Germans were already wearing the HJ uniforms (Hitlerjugend – auth.’s note). During the breaks, we were allowed to walk in the hallways. I already wore the tricolour displayed on my clothes, but my sister would always come and cry, because they wrote some derogatory inscriptions on the blackboard to her. In my case, none of the schoolmates would ever dare to do something like that. In the 1970s, all my schoolmates began visiting me, but my sister didn’t want to speak to any of them. She didn’t want to keep in touch with anybody anymore. But I was respected by them. Many times, they entreated me to make it up with the teachers for them when they were in a mess. Therefore, I never had any problems with them. And when they later came to visit me, they would even bring me presents and they were very friendly. I had good relations with them.”
Editha Kokojanová, née Mayerová, was born October 9, 1921 in Olomouc. Her father came from a Jewish family and her mother was a German national, but their nationality or religion did not play any role in the family. After he married, the father abandoned his religion, and Editha’s mother declared her loyalty to the Czechoslovak Republic at the time when German nationalism was on the rise. In early October 1938, the family had to flee the town of Šternberk which became occupied by the Nazi Germany after the Munich agreement. However, neither in their new home in Olomouc were they able to live in peace. The family was persecuted by the Gestapo, and Editha’s father Eduard Mayer was arrested on April 7, 1942. He perished in Auschwitz several months later, on November 28, 1942. Other members of the family likewise suffered various hardships. Her brother Jiří Mayer was interned in the camp in Postoloprty in 1944 and after his successful escape, he had to spend several weeks in hiding. The family was persecuted by the communist regime as well. Her sister Gertruda lived in the USA, and Editha’s brother Jiří attempted to emigrate to Palestine in 1948. Instead, he was imprisoned and the family began to live under the surveillance by the Secret Police. Jiří Mayer was eventually sentenced in 1953 in a staged trial to ten years of imprisonment for espionage. He was released only in the amnesty in 1960. Editha Kokojanová worked as a clerk after the war. Died in Olomouc in 2015.
