Růžena Vlasta Říhánková

“Brno was being taken over by the Russians and every evening they were bombing some place, and the Řečkovice neigbourhood is in the western part of Brno, you got Královo Pole and then Řečkovice. Now there are the university dorms there, but at that time it was really on the outskirts of the city, almost in the fields, and there was a road leading to the west. Before it was all over, Germans were moving away, running away on this road. The old neighbourhoods of Brno were bombed afterwards, today they don’t exist anymore, but at that time, there were many Germans living in these old parts of the city. They were even still wearing hats and white stockings, both men and women. Women in their dirndls and they were always so loud. The German technical university was in Brno, thus there were always quite a lot of German students. The Česká Street belonged to the Czech students and the Germans students frequented the street which intersected it. There were always some fights going on between our students and the German students there.” Interviewer: “Have you also experienced that?” – “No, I’ve only heard about it. German children were marching there and singing, and when Brno was occupied, there were all Germans there. When the end of the war was approaching, the Germans from the old parts of Brno who were moving away were then showing up in Řečkovice, we saw them moving away, and especially the soldiers. Several times they knocked on the door and some of them politely asked ´bitte wasser,´ – they wanted water to drink, and some were asking where the Americans were. They feared the Russians, so they were fleeing to the west. And then the inner Brno was taken and the fighting for Řečkovice began, and I had my newborn baby with me. In Řečkovice, our flat was rather up on a hill, and on the opposite side there was a street where there were flats, which were partly on the ground floor and partly in the basement, and my dad, my husband and I with the baby were hiding in one of them, which belonged to our friends. There was no running water, because this was destroyed by bombing, there were only wells, so every time when there was no shooting, the men would run there to bring some water. There was not much to eat, only what we had taken with us. And then the Russians took the place. But we were lucky, because one of the soldiers parked his kathusha in front of the house, and he wanted to lie down there. There was a narrow corridor leading to the house, and he lay there to rest. We brought a flat-chair for him, he asked for tea, and at that moment, some of their soldiers peeped in there, they were criminals who were fighting in the foremost lines, he said, and therefore he immediately told them that there was nobody in the house and sent them away. And he was there with us, and meanwhile the shooting ceased and in the evening they came to the house for tea, I remember they were already somewhat merry and one of these merry sergeants took my baby to hold him for a while, and I was so afraid. And it was not nice, either, because there was no water, so obviously we were not able to wash our things, there were small children. It was quite difficult, but it did not last for long.”

“Today the place is called Sněžné, at that time it was called Německé. It is ten kilometers up to the mountains, ten kilometers uphill, there was the staff of the partisans and since we were all students, a math student would be helping out as an accountant, and she was keeping double books, the real ones and the ones for inspections. A lot of food was being sent to the partisans to Nové Město. We all knew about it, we did not mind. As far as I know, there were only two Germans in Nové Město. One was some Sturmbahnführer and the other an Obersturmbahnführer or what. And one of them was in charge of us, and he was making inspection visits. Because I could speak German, I always had to interpret at the cooperative meetings. At times, I was terribly nervous, because he was… what a nasty menacing figure. We were under his control, and he would come and say straight away that he wanted some cheese what not, and the administrator had to give it to him. But I don’t know about any informers or fascists or Germans like that in Nové Město. The people there, perhaps people living up there in the mountains are better than people elsewhere.”

Interviewer: “You mentioned that even your supervisor was helping this partisan group, which you all knew about. And nobody reported this to authorities at the time…” – “No, nobody.” Interviewer: “And you managed to keep it throughout the war…” – “Throughout the entire war. One day I saw his wife on TV. He was already dead at that time. But what she was telling was not quite precise, about the planes landing there, about them setting signal fires to mark the landing area for them. They were there and we all knew that. He also supported other people – for instance, there was a young judge, who was executed, and his wife with a little child stayed there, and she was wearing black widow’s clothes throughout the war. It happened right in the first years of the war. I remember that we all knew that he was supporting her. Or when there was some meeting: I will never forget it, one also remembers such dreadful moments in one’s life. There was a meeting of this agricultural cooperative and in a nearby village there was some important landowner, and two Germans were enjoying his property, coming to his place for hunting and for feasts. And he was active in the Agrarian or some other group, there were various secret anti-German groups, and so they executed him. And we had this meeting because of that. And he began by saying… because the man had been a member of this cooperative as well. So we opened the meeting and we were all terribly sad and suddenly he started speaking and I was supposed to interpret it, and he said that he had been meeting him, but that he would never believe, that he never knew the man was ´so ein politische schwein,´ and you had to translate these words. They all understood it, but it was terrible. There were cases like this. If it had been found out, we would have been punished, especially the accountant, who was keeping these double accounts, and all of us who knew about it, would have been deported somewhere. There was one friend among us, he was not employed in the dairy, but he was our age, perhaps a bit younger than me. And we knew him well. He served as a messenger for the partisans. He was working for his aunt’s shop, she had a grocery shop, and his job was purchasing honey from bee-keepers. And he worked as a messenger for the partisans. And he was also somewhere in Tři Studně, or Studnice, I confuse the names of these two villages. There was a sort of staff. And he was going there regularly, and I was bringing books from home for myself to read, there were no libraries, you know, public libraries. And I have always been an avid reader, so I was bringing books and borrowing them to him, and he was carrying them up there, because those two men who were hiding there, one of them was professor Grňa and two others, he did not tell me. I accidentally met one of them when he went for a walk in the forest at night. Later, we were not in touch often, he was not visiting us as often, because he was probably busy with the partisans, and then they shot him somewhere there. We knew about it, his name was Eda Soška, and now, when I arrived to Nové Město na Moravě after those twenty-one or however many years, I saw a sign saying ´Soška´s Street,´ and his photo in the museum.”

“People were needed in Slovakia. There were state officials, policemen, railways workers, but they were all Czech. Because only the coming generation, which graduated at the same time as us, could then take these jobs, but they had not been there before. There were very few educated people. At the beginning, in elementary school, we had some Slovak teachers, and then at the grammar school, there were one or two Slovaks. One of them came from Martin or Mikuláš, I don’t know exactly, from one typically Slovak town with a scholarly tradition, but normally the number of people from the educated class was very low in Slovakia, it began to change later around 1945. Thus even in a Slovak class we were taught by a Czech teacher. There were Slovaks in the Spiš region, it was mixed, there were Germans – the Zipserdeutsche, they had this funny accent, then there were some Hungarians, who then became Slovaks, plus Slovaks and Czechs. And in our class we were all mingled like this, beside that we had two Catholics in the class, there were others who belonged to one of the two or three evangelical churches, one was a non-religious. There were Czechs. Plus Jews, several of them, there were quite a lot of Jews there.” – “Do you recall any problems, ethnic or religious?” – “On the contrary, and on top of that it was also politically diverse – there were adherents of the People’s Party, extreme leftists, the middle, and there were also students from very poor families from the villages – but we got along very well, and especially in our class. When we had a reunion, well, I met them again after thirty years, because then I lived in West Bohemia and I did not even know about them and I could not go – I had three little children. We did not even keep in touch through letters, and I did not know anything about them, but after thirty years we had this reunion, and then till our sixtieth anniversary after graduation we had reunions every five years. But already while students, we were great friends and we held together and we were getting along and helping each other. And for instance, if there was a dance, and one of the girls was invited by a guy whom she did not fancy too much, she just nodded her head to another classmate, and he stepped in, really, it was very nice. We played sports, there was a sports club, and we could even play tennis there almost for free, and we were going to a swimming pool, and on skiing trips. And we liked to see each other even after all these years, we all knew about the other, about what happened with each of us the meantime.”