Sonja Pešatová-Vacková

* 1932  †︎ 2021

  • “They sent us to the cellar, there were still some potatoes there, which we ate and we slept on them. They gave us just some paper sacks which we would put on the potatoes and sleep on them at night. And there was fighting, there was shooting, planes were flying above us at night. So we spent maybe three nights sleeping on potatoes, and meanwhile, the Russians came, so we could sleep in beds again. But there was no bed linen, they just gave us some blankets, quite rudimentary, as the Russian soldier also wanted to sleep there. And of course they had to watch over us, as we were just children, I was thirteen years old, I was so skinny, just this tall and thin girl. Well, the girls and the Russians, we were not safe at all, I would say. So we slept in those beds for maybe fourteen days. But we couldn´t go home as we had been liberated on April 28th and Ostrava wasn´t free until April 30th. And we couldn´t go home, as our parents said that there was no connection, we couldn´t take a train, there were no buses at that time, so the only option was to walk, and it was 45 kilometers to Ostrava. So we had to wait, and I think that we came home as late as on May 24th. And do you know how it was? We went by a cattle train, as there were no other carriages than those cattle trains, the ones which took you to those German camps. There were no chairs or anything, we just sat on the floor, and we went bit by bit, as there was a bridge, and if the bridge was just gone, it had been blown up, we would get up from the train, take our shoes and put them around our necks and we would cross the river, Prostřední Bečva river it was, to the other side, with a suitcase on this long stick, with my sister. And the water was knee-high in that river, we crossed to the other side and there was another train waiting for us, so we would get in, and we had to do it three times.”

  • “There´s a thing I recall, in 1939... I came back home from school, being just this little girl, and I remember that I came to the kitchen where my grandmother was, and my grandmother said: 'The war has begun.' And I said to myself: 'Well, so it did...' I just didn´t pay attention, as I had no idea about war, about what it was. But we went outside. We had been living in the centre of Ostrava, in the Masaryk Square (Masarykovo náměstí). And then I saw these boys marching, maybe twelve or thirteen-years old, they had white knee high socks, drums and trumpets. So they were marching there looking like this, playing, and I was watching them. And there was a boy walking on the pavement and he slapped me on the head. And I just looked at him and I couldn´t do anything, as I was afraid. Well, I didn´t know they were Hitlerjugend, keep in mind that I was just a seven-years old.”

  • “There was Jewish school not far from the street we lived in, so those children had been going there, but some of them went to my class as well. These were children from 'mixed families', who somehow managed to survive, not even one of them ended up in a concentration camp. Some Jews left for England as soon as in 1939 and didn´t come back till 1945; and I was looking forward to seeing this friend of mine. But she left for Israel, after 1950 maybe, as she was an Orthodox Jew, her entire family left, and since then, I didn´t hear from her, they had been living in kibbutz.”

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    Praha, 15.07.2019

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We didn´t know whether our house was still standing

Sonja Pešatová, a native of Ostrava from a family of musicians, was born on January 6th 1932. She witnessed the rise of Nazism, burning of the synagogue in Ostrava and also the bombing of the city. At the end of the war, she was in a sanatorium with her sister, 45 kilometers from her home. After passing her secondary school leaving exams, she wasn´t found suitable to study at university by a committee, so she enrolled in distance learning courses at a conservatory in Brno. She had been working as a piano teacher and later also as a tourist guide. Sonja Pešatová died on 9 February 2021.