Helena Pohořelská

* 1937

  • "I remember that my father came home from the election, I was at home, and he came home very upset and told my mother, not me, I just listened to it. That in that big hall, it was called the Slavic House, that there was this gathering of all the people who were supposed to come there, and that there was just an election for the Communist Party. And that when he saw who had been elected chairman - I don't know if it was the chairman, I'm saying, just the most important one - that he was from our village of Březce - now he named him and he said, 'The biggest crook in the village, he was the highest one there, so I took the legitimation and I threw it on the table and I went away.' So he came, that's how I know."

  • "Because the Russians were not allowed to go to the toilet for hygiene reasons, lest they infect us with some disease. The adults who lived in our house, they told us that the one - there was a common toilet, it was one privy for the whole families - that one Russian went to the toilet, even though they were strictly forbidden, they went to the piles next to the toilet. And the commander had him shot for going to that toilet."

  • "We used to go there [to Vechter], and her [my friend's] parents always gave us bags and we would go to the tracks and when the train was coming, we would wave at it and they knew to throw coal to us. When it was with the soldiers, they didn't throw it to us, but when it was a passenger train, they always threw us a shovel and we would pick it up - the coal - around the tracks, but more kids from the village did that. But I was just going to do that with this friend."

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    Olomouc, 01.06.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 01:15:48
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

When State Security came to the factory to get me, I was 16.

Helena Pohořelská, 1961
Helena Pohořelská, 1961
zdroj: archive of the witness

Helena Pohořelská, born Fryblíková, was born on 20 August 1937 in Březce, Olomouc. From her childhood years, she remembers mainly late war scenes: a German medical train shot by the Soviets, which was looted by the locals immediately afterwards, the explosion of a Soviet tank, which was hit by a grenade by the retreating Germans, or the fact that the Soviets were forbidden to go to the toilet for hygienic reasons. After the war, her parents moved to Sternberg, where they occupied a house left by the Germans. And because her father, Alois Fryblík, worked as a guard in a concentration camp for Sudeten Germans awaiting deportation, the family was able to request a German woman to work at home. During elementary school, Helena had a girls‘ club called „The Boys‘ Avengers“, in which the girls wrote and directed theatrical fairy tales for preschool children. With the advent of the Pioneer youth organization, the club was ordered to close. In 1952 Helena joined the Chronotechna in Šternberk as an apprentice toolmaker. Although she lived in the town, she had to live in a boarding school where education was conducted in the Stalinist spirit. In her second year, the State Security came to the factory to pick her up and interrogated Helena for several hours - they wanted to know if and which of the apprentices had uttered a profanity against the Communist Party in the common room. Despite being shouted at and threatened, she said nothing. In her most difficult moments, she clung to the image of the Soviet partisan Zoya, who had been captured, tortured and executed by the Nazis during the war. Helena Pohořelská worked all her life in Chronotechna in Šternberk. At the time of the interview in 2024, she was still living in Šternberk.