Eva Mečlová

* 1938

  • "When we got married, we had a motorcycle first. And the way we got it was that when we were only dating, my husband won it on a three-crown lottery ticket. In Prague, there was always a motorcycle speedway at Strahov on the ninth of May. And we were there, and my husband, when we were on our way there from the village, he said, 'Look, here's a lottery ticket for three crowns, some lady pushed it to me on Wenceslas Square, she said, 'Mister, I have the last lottery ticket for three crowns, it's for the Strahov tomorrow, so buy it.' So he bought it, and what actually happened was that there was a program, we were standing, we were standing there with my friend and her boyfriend. It was a hot day on the ninth of May and there was a prize draw during the break between the races. The first prize was a Škoda, I don't know what type it was, but a Škoda, you know. The second prize was a Jawa 250 and the third prize was a Jawa 175. And there was a Pioneer motorbike, Favorit bikes, it was all about that stuff. We were standing there and now the announcer was saying, 'This number wins the first prize, a Škoda car.' It was hot and my husband was standing in front of me on a lower step and I had my hands on his shoulders and I was holding the ticket in front of me like this and I didn't even... And now second prize, third prize, and still nothing. And there was a young man standing behind me and he said, 'Miss, you have the number.' And my husband, who was crazy about motorbikes, grabbed it and rushed there and they handed him the motorbike, and then they actually put it on the train. We took the train through Kralupy nad Vltavou to Prague, and he came back with the motorbike, so it was a huge stroke of luck."

  • "One evening someone knocked on the door and a group of Russians came in, they were staying in the police officers’ building, the younger ones in tents. And he came with some officer’s flunkey, and also the son of the farmer, who owned the farm next door and in whose room we were staying. And they said, 'You're going to sleep with me. You have fifteen minutes to get her to sleep, and then I'll come.' And if she doesn't, they'll... they'll shoot her. This was the house we lived in, and the room had two windows in the front at the level of the raised first floor. And so my mother put a coat over my nightgown, she was already in her nightgown too, she put our shoes on, sat me on the window, opened the window and jumped under the window. We were in complete dark and she told me: 'Evička, you mustn't cry, even if something hurts you,' so I jumped into her arms and she dragged me down the street towards the village square, there was the police house, they were called “četníci” back then. She dragged me through the ditch, there was mud, and in a moment I saw that they were shooting at something in the street. My mother dragged me to the police station, because supposedly there was someone there who would stand up for us, she dragged me up the stairs, there were wounded soldiers lying there, probably Russians. We didn’t find any policemen there, so my mother said: ‘We have to go to aunt Hepová.’ So she dragged me to the other end of the street to my aunt's, we woke her up and we spent the night there. In the morning she went to tell the policemen, they told her that they already knew and that they had reported it to their command. They lined them up, but they didn't shoot them. However, they had some punishment. It was a horror and then we learned in school about our liberators and about how grateful we will be to them and I always remembered this horror that we went through."

  • "My father never got out of the concentration camp, because at the beginning of May of 1945 they took the prisoners out of the concentration camp and they had to march to the port of Hamburg, and there they had to embark on two ships, where there were over three thousand prisoners in total. One of the ships was called the Cap Arcona, and this is actually supported by evidence, there was a film made about it about twenty years ago. And my father got on the Cap Arcona and the next day, or if it was the same day that they boarded them, the English, who probably didn't know, bombed them. The prisoners were all below decks, the Gestapo had lifeboats ready, and if anybody managed to get away from that boat and swim a little bit, they were able to shoot them in the water. It was a horrible massacre."

  • "After the war, when the war was over, my father was missing because we didn’t know about this. Dad was missing, and mom was going to Prague to different offices and facilities where returning prisoners gathered, and still didn’t find out anything. Because he was missing, neither my mother nor I were entitled to any pension or child benefits, but that wouldn't have been the main thing. The main thing was that nobody knew what was going on with my father. And after the war, there are also records of this, there used to be a radio show called Living Words on Sundays at nine o'clock in the morning, and there was always somebody telling their stories from the war. And one time, we were lucky, because my mother had the radio on, and E. F. Burian was just speaking, and he was telling this story. He was talking about what happened to the prisoners, and then he read a list of the Czech prisoners who were there. My mother immediately went to Prague and asked for an audience with him, so they talked about it, and he said that he had obtained the list, but he didn't know my father personally. Of that large number of prisoners, only over thirty were saved. So at least we knew that now. Of course, as we didn’t have his death certificate, there was no proof, so we got nothing again."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Liberec, 31.03.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:54:06
  • 2

    Liberec, 25.01.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:20:29
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

They heard about their father‘s death on the Cap Arcona ship on the radio from E. F. Burian

Eva Mečlová in 1955 in her graduation photo
Eva Mečlová in 1955 in her graduation photo
zdroj: Eva Mečlová's archive

She was born on June 29, 1938 in Litol near Lysá nad Labem to Mr. and Mrs. Hanousek. Her father, Karel Hanousek, worked as an acquisition clerk in an insurance company and after the declaration of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia he was assigned to work in a German company in Kolín as a translator. Later, his German employer sent him to a branch near Paris in German-occupied France. Because of listening to banned radio broadcasts, the Germans imprisoned him in the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. At the end of April 1945, he was among the 9,000 prisoners evacuated by the Germans from the camp to the port of Lübeck, where they were put on four ships. The contemporary witness’s father was on the German steamship called Cap Arcona, which was attacked by British pilots on 3 May 1945. Those pilots believed that the ship was carrying German officials to Denmark and Norway. Karel Hanousek died in the bombing, as did most of the prisoners. The contemporary witness’s mother learned of his death on the radio from the director E. F. Burian, who survived the attack on Cap Arcon and read the names of his deceased fellow prisoners on the radio broadcast. During the war the contemporary witness lived with her mother in the village of Oleška near Kostelec nad Černými Lesy, where her father‘s parents lived. In 1947, she moved with her mother to Nové Ouholice in the Mělník region, where her stepfather had a garden center. She attended the primary school in Nová Ves and the eleven-year school in Kralupy nad Vltavou. After graduating from high school, she worked as an educator, married Zdeněk Mečl in 1959 and moved to Liberec, where her husband studied at the College of Engineering and Textile. In Liberec, she worked as a first grade teacher and later as a deputy headmaster, and her husband was the headmaster of the Secondary Industrial Textile School for thirty years. They had two sons - the older one, Zdeněk, made a name for himself in the textile industry, the younger one Jan is the head of urology at the hospital in Liberec. In January 2023 she lived in the Františkov Retirement‘ Home in Liberec.