Luisa Matoušková

* 1930

  • "And we already knew that it was possible to run away, no matter the barrier, you could run away. And even before I ran away, they suddenly said 'The Russians are coming'! And a tank, a Russian one, was driving, and there was this man in that cap standing at the top, and we waved, excited, and suddenly... when you hear shooting on TV, it's not that at all. It's just 'yum, yum'! And suddenly I look and next to us some girl grabs her leg. Imagine that there was a German in that direction, who, when he saw that... he shot at us girls. And that Russian fell like a snake, as if I had seen him, from the tank, he disappeared, and it didn't take two minutes and he already had him. Then he brought him and said 'girls' and that he was giving him to us to kill. We said we'd seen so many dead, we're not going to kill anyone. And he said - well... He turned - I didn't look anymore - he wasn't even worth a bullet, he took him with an inverted shotgun, probably beat him up on the spot, I don't know... He got on and drove on..."

  • "Then it was said that the Swiss commission would come, so they took us, a whole bunch of young girls, they shone us - without glasses, without everything - with the mountain sun, so that we wouldn't go green. All those who were really bad all around were moved upstairs to the attic. That's also an experience... those poor people over there... the helplessness is terrible... they used to send down a can with a string and bang with it and beg for anything, a piece of bread or anything... and you had nothing you could have given them. That was a shock even for a fourteen-year-old girl, that was a shock..."

  • "My motto in life is great - that life is one big theater. Please, always play a comic role in it, everything for fun, because otherwise you will be sad and no, no way... Everything can always be solved with humor. That's my life... Just always, either you collapse or you invent something. Invent, that's my essential... even if you're ninety, you still have something to invent, like here I invented my hand, look, it's already gone flat..."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Šumava, 01.07.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:06:32
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I don‘t want to see anyone dead, not even an SS. I‘ve seen too many corpses.

Luisa Matoušková, 2022
Luisa Matoušková, 2022
zdroj: a photo taken by Václav Pancer

Luisa or Líza Matoušková was born on November 25, 1930 in Nové Hrady into a mixed Czech-Jewish family. Her mother was a Christian, her father belonged to the extensive Jewish business family of the Cíglers. Before the war, the witness was used to speaking Czech and German, having Czech and German friends. But that changed with the war, the family faced anti-Jewish measures, and the witness‘s father also died at that time. At the beginning of 1945, she had to board a transport to Terezín. She went home alone in May 1945. Her sister Berta returned a month later because she fell ill with scarlet fever. Of the extended family, only the witness with her sister Berta returned. Before the state returned the property to the family after the war despite all the bureaucracy, the communists were already in power and the property was confiscated again. The witness started working at the age of 16 in a textile factory, but later she was a housewife and helped her husband, a painter. In 1950, she was interrogated by State Security in connection with Jan Mašek, a well-known people smuggler from Šumava. Luisa Matoušková had many hobbies in life - competitive fishing, riding motorcycles and cars, shooting with a small rifle, yachting, acting. After the revolution, the family got their property back and Luisa fulfilled her dream, setting up a ceramics shop.