Irma Nedvědová

* 1948

  • “They told me they were supposed to take the rich ones, but usually took the younger and cleverer ones. They took those. The rich stayed, but there really weren’t any rich people here, someone had an extra ox or cow, but nobody was rich. They said they had to send someone, so they took… My husband’s Dad was a cook with the Germans during the war. They took a few boys from here, saying they’d teach them a trade and instead conscripted them. My husband’s Dad didn’t say anything, he thought that’s why they took them [to Bărăgan]. There were also more of those boys who thought it was for the war. But then they found out different. Suddenly, nobody knew anything, at night they came to get them, gathered them up and loaded them on the coal train and that was it. They had no idea where they were headed. They said they were unloaded in the fields somewhere, I think. There was nothing there. There was a storm, they had nowhere to hide, they had small children. They dug a hole in the ground and covered it up a bit. My husband said – he had a brother a year younger – that their mother stuffed them in a cupboard so they wouldn’t get wet. They built these various hovels there and then came back when they let them go.”

  • “It happened and then they were comforting me not to be afraid, everything would be all right. When I was younger, those first [births] in the region… I told myself they must be crazy to place their lives in my hands. I’d just left school, what could I know? I didn’t have anyone to ask for advice, to help me out. Nothing. But they wanted it. ‘It’s going to be fine, don’t you worry’ … and it was. It was good. One time two of them were giving birth at once and were quite far away from each other. I had to walk from one end to the other. From one to the other. But that also ended up all right.”

  • “To start with I had to find out whether it [the birth] was possible or not. When I knew something could go wrong, she had to leave quickly. That’s what I said, so we loaded her [the mother in labour] onto the sled with the tractor with big wheels… I stood on the mudguard because there wasn’t room in the sled. When I got down I couldn’t feel my legs that’s how freezing they were. It was pretty sad, but we managed.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Eibenthal, 10.09.2022

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

She helped at least thirty women give birth in her home village.

A photograph of the witness from the 1970s. Around the time of her 30s
A photograph of the witness from the 1970s. Around the time of her 30s
zdroj: archive of a witness

Irma Nedvědová, née Havlíčková, was born on 20 February 1948 in Eibenthal in Romanian Banat, as the last offspring of Marie and Štefan Havlíček. She attended school at her village of birth and after completing it she went to study at a medical school in Arad, where she became a midwife. Even during her studies she assisted with births in Eibenthal, where she functioned as a midwife for three years after completing her studies. She helped at least thirty women give birth in a home setting. At the age of 21 she and her husband moved to Orșova, where she worked at the local hospital for the next 35 years. Her husband, Ernest Nedvěd, was from a family that the Romanian Communist Party deported from Eibenthal to Bărăgan in June of 1951. In 2006 she and her husband returned to the place of their birth for good, where the witness lives to this day (September 2022).