Gertruda Turnová

* 1928

  • "She turned me in to the cops once... We lived alone in the hill, there were no other houses. And if someone was riding a bike or walking down there, there was only a narrow road, no cars could pass. And my mother-in-law denounced me for standing on the road and saying to the people passing by, 'Heil Hitler!' She did things like that to me. I said, I'm not such an idiot to do that. I was afraid to talk to anyone, I was afraid that when the Czechs found out I was German, they wouldn't want to talk to me."

  • "Two soldiers came out, came to us. One of them had a grenade in his hand and they told me and my mother to get on the truck, that we were going to clean the potatoes. But there were no potatoes. They dragged us into the forest and raped us. I didn't even have a boyfriend at that time, or had ever seen a man in my life. They dragged us into the woods, my mother was a short distance away from me, and two soldiers went after her. One soldier was watching the road to see if anyone was coming. One soldier held a gun to my chest. I was defending myself, kicking with my boots and I kept shouting, 'Mommy, Mommy,' and my mom told me to be quiet and not to shout, that they had a grenade, that they could drop it on the ground and that we would be dead."

  • "He was carrying ammunition on a truck close to the border, it must have been some bombs or something lighter. Suddenly he didn't write to us anymore. And that meant, if he didn't write for two years, he died. We prayed, we were two girls, and my mom always urged us to go pray, maybe my dad would come back."

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    Jiříkov, 30.05.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 02:10:25
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - Ústecký kraj
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The soldier who raped me wanted to take me to Russia, so I escaped

Gertruda Turnová on a belt conveyor on the state farm in Království u Šluknova, 1963
Gertruda Turnová on a belt conveyor on the state farm in Království u Šluknova, 1963
zdroj: archive of a witness

Gertruda Turnová was born on 27 December 1928 in Wittichenau, Saxony, into a family of a Pole and a Lusatian Serb, the elder of two daughters. Her father Johann died during the Second World War. Mother Agnes worked for a farmer on a farm and had to turn around to support herself and her children. Towards the end of the war, the mother and the witness, who was fifteen years old, were raped by Soviet soldiers. My mother became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Helga, and later remarried and her second husband adopted all of her daughters. Gertrude fled to Czechoslovakia for fear of the soldier who raped her and wanted to take her with him to the Soviet Union. There she met her husband František in the village of Království and in 1948 their first daughter Eva was born. They married five years later. The witness did not obtain Czechoslovak citizenship until 1963. She and her husband raised six children together, three daughters and three sons. She worked in agriculture and her husband was the manager of several state farms. He also managed a farm in the now defunct village of Fukov in the Šluknov foothills. In 1974, Gertruda Turnová found employment at the Bytex national enterprise in Jiříkov, where she remained for six years after her retirement. In 2024 she was living in Jiříkov in the Děčín region. We were able to record the story of the witness thanks to financial support from the municipality of Jiříkov.