“Someone rang the bell at ten p.m., and so he came in. He came in and asked Dad: ‘Surely you won’t let Věrka go to Germany, didn’t you know about it, couldn’t you have come to me?’ But back then Dad hadn’t dared to, seeing that we didn’t visit him at all any more, there was another doctor here... Well, so he put me in his car and took me to the hospital, that I have a problem with my appendix. So they made as if to operate me straight away, and then the German police came, because I wasn’t at the station, right. So they came to the hospital, to see if I was there. They went to our flat first. They looked in wardrobes, checked if I was at home, and so then they came to the hospital...”
“Here in the square in Mariánské Hory... that line [of houses], where the post office is today... that got a direct... there were normal houses there, and they got a direct hit.”
Věroslava Tkáčová was born on 26 September 1924 in Ostrava. She enjoyed a peaceful childhood with her parents and brother in Ostrava-Mariánské Hory. She experienced the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and the outbreak of World War II as a young girl. The horrors of the war affected those closest to her - her father was arrested by the Gestapo and her relatives were taken to a concentration camp. Věroslava avoided forced labour thanks to the help of a former family doctor. She was an eye-witness of the tragic event in Lískovic in 1943, where the Nazis executed five innocent men as a warning, leaving their bodies to hang on railway posts. Shortly before being liberated, she experienced air raids and the bombing of Ostrava by Soviet aeroplanes. She married after the war, in 1947; she has two daughters. Věroslava Tkáčová died in August 2019.
