“We went there the second or third day after (the arrest, auth.’s note) to bring them clothes; it was the day after. They were just transporting them from the prison and as we stood by the prison entrance, my husband saw me from the prison van. He thus knew that I was there. They were interrogating them in Libuše and they told him: ´Your wife has confessed.´ Some woman was screaming there, but they had it all staged. But my husband knew that I was outside the prison and he was thus sure that it was not me.”
“My uncle, he was a soccer player, and he was returning from some meeting. He met a man who asked him where the Severín family lived. He replied: ´I know all of Severín’s friends, but I don’t know you.´ - ´We know each other from the war,´ and stuff like that. My uncle actually showed him the way. He didn’t know who the man was. My husband knew that he was in trouble. I had said to him: ´If you are involved in something, do not tell me anything for they would be able to beat a confession out of me.´ When they found out about everything, there was a police raid in Skuteč and they arrested people from several villages at the same time, took them to the police station, and at night they transported them to the prison in Pardubice.”
(Interviewer: “Were there many Germans in Ludgeřovice before the war?”) “I should say that we were there as teachers, and we would go to see the construction of the fortresses. The terrain there was mountainous and they were therefore building fortresses, whereas here in the flat land, trenches were being built instead. We were going there with the other teachers to have a look. They also had those barriers against the tanks. Lots of armament activity was going on there. I stayed there for few more days. I was there when they German army arrived in these side cars. I thought that nothing would happen to me since I was a German teacher. Then I learnt that they had been watching me, and so I started walking through the back alleys along the railway instead.”
Ludmila Severinová was born on September 12th, 1916 in Skuteč. She grew up in poverty, her father was a shoemaker and her mother did embroidery. Ludmila had a brother eight years younger than she was, she also had a younger sister who died as a child. After attending elementary school in Svitavy, she started to study at the local training school for teachers. She got her first job at Ludgeřovice near Hlučin. But after the Henlein party took over, she had to leave the borderlands like many other Czechs. As she had good German, she had been teaching the language at elementary school. In 1942, the Nazis took a girl from her class, a resident of the village of Ležáky, which they later razed. They murdered men and women. They girl died later in a gas chamber. In 1943, Ludmila married Jaroslav Severin, whom he befriended while going to school in Svitavy. After the war, her husband was working at his father‘s printing house and joined the anti-Communist resistance. After he was arrested, he was sentenced to eleven years in prison by the Communist justice system; he was serving his sentence in a labour camp, working in uranium mines, like many men from the so-called Bulíček resistance group. He was released after six year. In the 1950s, Ludmila managed to graduate from the Faculty of Education. All her life she has been working as a teacher. She passed away on August 27th, 2019 in Skuteč.
