Irena Musilová

* 1937

  • "There were eight of them in all, six there and the two were on the street or something. So they took them, they put them in this road, like a little hill, they had to stand there. The horses, everything was taken away with the grain, I don't know where it came from. And they shot them there. And they were shot by a young boy, that's what Mrs. Koprivova, who came there, from us, with her six-year-old daughter, told us. And they told her that as soon as she or her daughter would turn their head, they would shoot them there too. So the little girl cried, that was Alice, and clung to her mother convulsively, saying she wanted to go home. But they watched them get shot, then they were allowed to go home. By the time she got home, she told me afterwards, her hair was completely grey. And she told us what happened there and who shot them and she didn't say anything more and they moved away."

  • It started like this - why did Dad lose his life - that on the fifth [of May 1945] there was shooting in the woods behind us, and everyone said that there was still one person left from Petříkov. So our father took a long coat and went to see. And he found Mr. Lexa wounded there. So he took him in his arms and brought him into the yard. And when he came to the yard, they saw on the coat that it was shot through, but he was unharmed. And he said, in that yard, my brother told me afterwards, 'Well, you see, here I am all over, and the gypsy woman guessed that when I was thirty-eight I would lose my life, but not in the normal way.' And that's what happened. And now the Germans started to leave and there was shooting here and there. And now the manager said he wanted flour from the Popovice mill, and nobody agreed- everybody refused to bring it, that they were shooting. And my father said he would go there. So he took a horse and he went there, and he took the sacks, and there were about five wagons, and they were going to grind it. And that was all right, and all of a sudden these Germans were fleeing and somebody was pretending to be a partisan at the brewery gate and started shooting at them. As they were driving away."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 18.06.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:15:50
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Mother forbade us to pray

Irena Musilová, back then Culková
Irena Musilová, back then Culková
zdroj: archív pamětnice

Irena Musilová, née Culková, was born on 9 June 1937 in Chotěbor. She grew up on the farm of the Ringhoffer family in the village of Petříkov near Velke Popovice, where her father Josef Culek drove a horse-drawn carriage and her mother Lea worked as an agricultural worker. Irena‘s childhood was largely marked by a complicated relationship with her mother, but above all by the tragic death of her father at the end of the war. Josef Culek was one of the men executed by the Germans on May 7, 1945 in Velke Popovice. The cause of the tragedy was a single shot fired at a passing SS column. The retaliation was to be the burning of the village and the execution of all the inhabitants, including women and children. They were all driven out of their houses and gathered in front of the brewery pub, where they had to lie face down and wait while executions took place elsewhere. Irene was at that moment hidden in the cellar of the farmhouse with her mother and brother, but her father was executed along with seven other men in front of the mill where he was waiting for the grain to be milled. Alltogether, 27 men were killed or executed that day. There were several reasons why the Nazis eventually refrained from further executions and the burning of the village. Among them were the pleas of the wife of the commander of the local gendarmes, a native German. Irena found it very difficult to accept the fact that she had lost the person closest to her. She soon married and moved to Říčany, where she lived with her family at the time of filming (2021).