Zdeňka Peterka

* 1936

  • "When the war was coming to an end, we were eagerly awaiting the Soviet army, which was already storming the Carpathian Mountains with cannons. We were forced to move to the basement, both families because our house was on a hill and there was a danger of being hit by some shrapnel. I mean, when the Soviet army got to Brod, there was a big marketplace behind our house, and they made big machine gun nests, six or eight, and shot between the villas. They always aimed so that they were shooting left to right between the villas. And we were worried that the Germans would find out and start shooting at us, too. That was in 1945. We were in the cellar, and one day, we heard a knock on the door. One of our men opened the door, and the Russians were in the yard. Well, of course, a big hurrah! They asked if there were any Germans, and we said, 'No, there are no Germans here.' The captain who was in charge of the battle - because the Germans had retreated behind the woods to the hill behind Brod - so he climbed up into our attic and took off a couple of tiles. His radio operator stretched wires there, and he directed the gun battle from our roof. We were just afraid that if the Germans answered and if they found out where the commands were coming from, our house might come down. Fortunately, that didn't happen because the Germans didn't stay there long. Eventually, they cleared out the forest and continued up towards Zlín."

  • "Maybe it was lucky that he was only in Brno, in the Kounic's dormitories, for a month. Because we all know how the Germans tortured people. Sometimes, I think, at least he didn't suffer so long. Of course, the Germans didn't even let us know that my father had been executed. A neighbour came to our house with a newspaper and showed my mother the article: 'Mrs. Luhan, it says here that your husband was executed.' I still didn't know what it was - executed. I saw my mother sitting in the room crying. I was in the room, I cried, too. And that's how it ended with Daddy. Someone I know who was present at the executions - he wasn't the only executed one - said that Daddy's last sentence, when the soldiers were already standing in front of him with their rifles drawn, he shouted, 'Long live the Czechoslovak Republic.'

  • "A policeman came to see my mother to see if Mr Luhan was home. Mummy said, 'He's not,' and he truly wasn't. The Germans wanted him there. And all I know is, Mummy said that the policeman said, 'Mrs Luhanová, don't let him go there, they'll lock him up.' But Daddy, when he came back in the evening, and Mummy told him, he said, 'No, I'll go there. If I didn't go there, they would arrest you and prosecute the family.' I know I was already in my bed in the bedroom - and I can still see the door from the kitchen open. A big bright rectangle. Daddy walked in the door, he was tall almost to the top of the door. He came to my bed, picked me up, gave me a kiss - and that was the last time I saw Daddy."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Zlín, 01.08.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:44:07
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

He came over to my crib and kissed me. That was the last time I saw my dad

Zdeňka Peterka around 1998
Zdeňka Peterka around 1998
zdroj: Witness archive

Zdeňka Peterka, née Luhanová, was born on 1 January 1936 in Kunovice near Uherské Hradiště. She grew up in Uherské Brod with her mother, Zdeňka (nee Pijáčková), and father, Václav. During the war, her father was a commander of the transport department in the resistance organisation Defence of the Nation. On September 15, 1941, her father was arrested, and a month later - on October 15 - the Nazis executed him by shooting him in the Kounice dormitories in Brno. Zdeňka Peterka remembers the procedures of the front, the bombing and the subsequent liberation of Uherský Brod on April 26, 1945. In the post-war period, she graduated from a grammar school, and in the first half of the 1960s, she extended her education at the pedagogical institute in Gottwaldov, today‘s Zlín. She then worked as a teacher all her professional life. After the Velvet Revolution, in 1993, she travelled to the USA to visit her childhood friend and former classmate Ladislav Peterka. She later married him, and they lived together on a ranch in Arkansas for the next 18 years. In 2011, after the death of her husband, Zdeňka Peterka returned to the Czech Republic. In 2023, she was living in Uherský Brod.