Ing. Dagmar Váchová

* 1938

  • "He was a typical 'Jewish child', and so the entire building had to have known. But nobody snitched on mother, which I consider a miracle. He came to us with a yellow star on his coat and mother immediately cut it off. They could not go anywhere, of course... Simply put, one day he appeared with us and the entire building accepted it. To this day it is amazing, that of course Czechs were not the type to immediately snitch on someone. It had to have been clear to them, that it was not a relative."

  • "Until that point mother had been in the household, not working. As the wife of a political prisoner she had no chance of getting any position. I even remember, how some dentist hired her as a technician. She worked with him for some time - and then he did not give her a single crown, because he knew, that she would not be complaining about it. It was very difficult. Thanks to relatives and acquaintances, who sometimes brought over something to eat. We also had a helper in the household, who had been totally mobilized, and from her earnings it was possible to partially live. It was quite difficult. Mother sold whatever she could back then."

  • "One of my earliest memories I have is of how the Gestapo came and was searching for some materials, so that they could lock dad up. I can see it as if it had happened today. I was sitting on the chamber pot in front of the fireplace and they flew in there and were digging through everything. Then they thought to dig through our toys. And so the toys flew around the whole apartment. They did not find anything, father wasn't so stupid as to hide his things in with the toys. I was nearly five years old."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 10.10.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:55:11
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

My mother tore off his yellow star and he started going out with us

Dagmar before leaving for Switzerland, 1946
Dagmar before leaving for Switzerland, 1946
zdroj: pamětnice

Dagmar Váchová was born on the 13th of February 1938 in Prague to the family of Prokop and Stella Domorázek. She had a four years older sister, Jana. Her father was an agricultural engineer, university pedagogue and a member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Her mother was in the household. Both of her parents were focused on art. Her father painted and sculpted in his free time, her mother visited sculpting lessons. The Domorázek family lived in Prague in Vinohrady. Their family line from their father‘s side had Jewish ancestors, but the family was saved and protected from the transport by the parish priest František Dobiáš, when he changed their baptism certificates. Prokop Domorázek was active in a resistance group that was connected to the Beroun communist cell and in the year 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo. Maybe only thanks to lucky circumstances did he manage to avoid the death penalty and survived the cruel treatment in the German prisons until the end of the war. Stella Domorázková remained without means for the duration of her husband‘s imprisonment, but still in the year 1945 she took a ten-year-old Jewish boy from a mixed family under her care, who was left without his parents for several months. After the war Dagmar‘s father joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the honest belief for a better society. But during the fifties her father was thrown out of the party because he refused to acknowledge the thoughts of the Soviet agronomic Lysenko as scientific as specified by the political order at the time. He also lost his job as a pedagogue at the agricultural university and was thrown out of the Academy of Sciences. Dagmar studied at an agricultural high school in Mělník. In the day of her graduation, in the year 1957, under the influence of her favourite teacher she joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. She then distance studied the agricultural university in Prague. In the middle of the sixties she got married and in the year 1968 she gave birth to a son. At the beginning of the seventies she did not manage to get through the proof examinations, when she did not agree with the Soviet occupation, and was thrown out of the party. Thankfully it did not influence her professional life. After a four year parental leave she started working at the Central Institute of Control and Test Agriculture at the post of a quality inspector. After the revolution in the year 1989 she started attending Christian gatherings and followed a path of faith. She worked as a volunteer for twenty-five years, helping the people who survived the Holocaust. She made available spiritual and psychological guidance for them.