Anna Matějková

* 1925

  • “Germans confiscated a truck from us. We had our sofa and clothes loaded there since we wanted to save at least some of it. Soldiers were everywhere and we got afraid as the front was approaching and we decided that we would rather move to a smaller town, but the Germans stopped us, and my mom, who could speak Germans, pleaded with them and she promised that our driver would turn back and that he would certainly go back with the truck. But I don’t know if he really went there or not.”

  • “It was in November and they dropped the bombs during the air raid. We were watching the calamity; it lasted for about twenty minutes. Since the windows in Pellicova Street were broken and they had mattresses in the windows, the blast opened the door of our house and it blew out and there was a time bomb in Husova Street and it killed some woman there.”

  • “We were doing forced labour and I came home after a night shift. We arrived from Adamov and then we went to the Jepa department store and since it was on November 20th, we thought that we would buy something for the St Nicolas Day. There was a warning announcement that an air raid was imminent and people were urged to go home, and we thus went home and we turned on the radio, because even though the sirens sounded, it was not really a full alarm, but when we heard on the radio that they would be bombing Moravia, we decided that we would go to the basement and suddenly we could already hear the roar of the airplanes.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Brno, 08.11.2016

    (audio)
    délka: 02:25:04
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

We accepted life as it went and we were happy with whatever had befallen us

As a young woman, c. 1947
As a young woman, c. 1947
zdroj: pamětníka

Anna Matějková, née Černá, was born January 3, 1925 in Brněnské Ivanovice. Thanks to her father‘s job they lived in a small company-owned house on the ramparts of the Špilberk Castle in Brno. Anna completed a ballet school and already during the war she began dancing in the ballet ensemble of the Municipal Theatre in Brno. Later she transferred to the People‘s Theatre. In 1944 she and her colleagues from the theatre were sent to do forced labour in the Adamov stamping factory. Anna witnessed a number of air raids on Brno by the Allied airplanes in 1944 and 1945. Among other places, she was hiding in a shelter in Špilberk with her family as well. She experienced the end of the war in Brno and the arrival of the Red Army. After the war she was a member of the People‘s Theatre, a theatre in Olomouc and the theatre ensemble Na Hradbách. When she finished her career as a ballet dancer, Anna taught dance classes in the People‘s Art School.