Family tragedy on the last day of the war
Stáhnout obrázek
Zdeňka Šillerová was born on the 4th of April in 1944 in Sebranice near Boskovice as the second-born daughter of František and Marie Hanákovi. During the First World War, her grandfather, František Slavíček, worked as a chauffeur for the Löw-Beer family who built several textile factories in the nearby Svitávka. Her uncle, Josef Slavíček, collaborated with the resistance in the Zbrojovka factory in Brno. He was arrested, imprisoned in the infamous Kounic Dormitories and in 1942, he died in the Auschwitz extermination camp. During the night from the 8th to the 9th May of 1945, German light tank destroyer drove over a crate of ammunition and the explosion caused a considerable material damage. There were casualties as well. Zdeňka’s uncle, František Slavíček, was gravely injured and lost his sight, her grandmother lost one eye. The parents with their two small children, Zdeňka and Marie, were in the adjoining room and they were saved by the heavy blackout curtaining. After finishing the basic school, Zdeňka apprenticed in the Tylex factory in Letovice and in 1960, she got married. She and her husband, Miloš Šiller, had two daughters, Zuzana and Ivana. In 1966, they moved to Karviná to the newly built residential neighbourhood. For several years, she worked as a cook in a kindergarten and her husband worked in the Karviná coal mines. Later on, she took courses on an institute for higher learning in social and legal matters and then she worked for the Union of the Disabled Citizens as an accountant. After her divorce in 1972, she and her daughters moved back to Sebranice. She survived a serious illness and after the Velvet Revolution, she played a part in founding the Boskovice museum. In 2020, she lived in her own in Sebranice, in the house where she was born.
