“We were having a handicraft class in the afternoon and Miss teacher saw her through the window walking down the Růžová Street with Věra Hanáková, and so she sent some girls to fetch them. They brought them over and there was a lot of greeting and hugging. The girls cried for joy for being able to spend a little time with us. They might have stayed half an hour, and then they went home.”
“Boskovice was liberated by partisans at six o’clock in the evening and my parents went to meet them, we had to stay at home. And then Russian soldiers came to stay with us, which was considerably worse. It was a sensitive issue as I was quickly growing up and Mom worried about me. Dad had to accompany the Russian soldiers on horseback to Prague, they were in a rush to get to Prague to meet the Americans. We had an officer staying with us and there was a fight. They had forced our tenant’s flat open, and eighteen soldiers were staying there, while we had but the one officer. We were lucky because the Russian military police, the GPU, were staying across the road. They wanted to shoot at each other from one flat to the other, but they were afraid of the GPU. In Boskovice, there was a Mr Ostrý, he was the director of the secondary school, I don’t know what became of him, a terribly nice person he was. He disappeared the moment the Russians came, right after the war, so I don’t know whether he got executed, I mean by the other side. Anyway, so my mom fetched Mr Ostrý to speak to them in Russian and explain they couldn’t shoot at each other. And the result was they managed until the morning and in the morning, they were all as drunk as a lord, all eighteen of them. The officer had taken off in the night. He knew there would be trouble, so he ran away through the window, jumped out of the window and ran. And when they were mounting their horses in the morning, their officer told them if they cannot stay in the saddle, he was going to shoot them straight. So, the drunkest of them all scrambled on top of his horse and rode off.”
“They had to stay at home, they’d been given the Jewish badge. That was in 1942, she was already wearing it. And then I witnessed that tragic moment which has been haunting me my entire life of Lily walking to join the transport. We lived close to the station, and I was just closing the window when she happened to be walking by. She could not see me, and I did not shout out to her because my heart was breaking for the poor girl. She couldn’t stop crying as she carried her small bundle. It can’t have been more than two kilos of food, or I don’t know how much they were allowed. As she was walking to the station, some people were walking in the opposite direction and she kept bumping into them, walking all by herself. I was really surprised to see her walking alone, without her mother or father.”
Naděžda Švédová was born on January 25, 1931, in Boskovice as the third child of Marie and Karel Dvořáček. Her father, a former legionary and landowner, had to hide from the Gestapo during the war. Her family were helping people in need with food and were facing persecution should their hidden food supplies be exposed. In March 1942, Naděžda’s Jewish classmate Lily Wechsbergová was put on a transport train along with other Jewish inhabitants of Boskovice and she perished at a Nazi extermination camp. In 1953, the witness graduated from Boskovice grammar school, and in 1955 she got a degree from the Brno-based University of Agriculture. Before her 1953-graduation, she married Zdeněk Švéd, who she had met during the post-war resettlement of border regions. They had two sons: Zdeněk was born in 1961 and Martin in 1965. Their younger son Martin died tragically in a gas explosion shortly after he had finished his veterinary studies in 1993. His older brother Zdeněk passed away in 2018. She worked for Agrostav Pardubice, after 1968 the married couple bought a second home in the countryside, a former forester’s house, where they would spend most of their free time. Naděžda Švédová retired in 1988. In 2021, along with her nephew Karel Dvořáček, she initiated the laying of a Stolperstein commemorating her Jewish classmate Lily Wechsberg in Boskovice. In 2021, she was living in Boskovice.
