“I fell asleep, and suddenly I hear a woman’s voice shouting that the whole of Sedlec was on fire. I woke up and came out of the forest, and I saw that indeed, Sedlec was one big inferno. The school was on fire. Those German brats had set the school on fire. Then they legged it. Before that they picked out the men and stood them up against the wall there. Before that they made them dig a ditch, then they shot them. Well, and we saw it burn. I cried. I was afraid for my parents, what would happen to our house. It was horrible. We waited for what would happen next, there were tanks passing through, though not so often. Then things calmed down, and there was complete silence. I couldn’t bear it any longer, so I set off to Sedlec. Suddenly I heard the town broadcast reading out the names of those who’d died and who were still missing. And the list of those missing included my name, Květa Hrunková. I was relieved, I reckoned that my parents must be alive if they were looking for me.”
“In 1948 I was working as a seamstress in Mrs Babická’s salon. Then the comrades came and turned the salon into a hotchpotch by the name of Clothes Works. It was desolate. They told us we’d be better off and we wouldn’t have to be exploited any more. Please, what kind of exploitation was it, when Mrs Babická allowed us to sew for ourselves after work time and on her expense. We sewed for her until six, and then we could stay and sew whatever we wanted to. And she’d even cut it and try it out for us; say, she’d even force me to change the buttons if she didn’t think I’d chosen the best ones. She was a wonderful woman. Then the comrades came and planted a timekeeper in the workshop. He measured how long it took us to sew one dress, and that’s what they used to fix our hourly wage. Dreadful.”
“So we decided we’d go to Vršek. But we stood sticking out there like sore thumbs, and suddenly the air around us started buzzing. They were shooting at us. We could see two tanks on the bridge, and bzzz, bzzz, again - finally we realised they were shooting at us. Quick, lie down, my friend shouted. I was afraid of getting my dress dirty, but he pulled me to the ground. Luckily, the grass was tall, it hadn’t been mowed yet. The bullets whizzed over our heads, and we crawled away. When the shooting stopped, and peeked out of the grass and saw a great, majestic lady strolling down the road from Šanovice. That was Mrs Blažková. But all of a sudden she disappeared. It seemed odd, how could she have disappeared so quickly. A bit further on I peeked out again and saw white-haired old Mr Calta sitting under a tree. I told my friend he was out with the geese. But a moment later he was gone too. I couldn’t work my head around it, what had happened to them. It wasn’t until the next day that I found out they’d been shot.”
Květuše Křemenová, née Hrunková, was born on 23 August 1926 into a shoemaker‘s family in the town of Sedlec-Prčice, and she still lives in her birth house. She attended school in Sedlec and then learnt sewing. During the war she was in danger of being assigned to forced labour in the Reich, and so she signed up for work at a dairy. She thought they would not send her to forced labour if she had a job there. But she was wrong - she was reported and subsequently sent to work at the Sellier & Bellot arms factory in Vlašim. She was employed there from March 1943 until the end of the war. She would visit home once every three weeks. In May 1945 she was an eye witness of the massacre of twenty civilians, who were shot by the retreating Nazis. After the war she finished her last year of training as a seamstress. She then obtained a post in the fashion house of Mrs Babická in Prague. She started the job on 25 March 1946 and ended with the end of 1949, as the salon was nationalised. The fashion house became Clothes Works, but Květa Křemenová retained her place there. She spent her whole professional career until her retirement in 1985 on the first floor of 38 Wenceslas Square. She married in 1954, her husband was an electrician; they had two children, a son and a daughter.
