Ludmila Vlachová

* 1937

  • “I have practically no memory of my father. I can only remember one thing, how he escaped from the concentration camp in Breslau. We were living in Horní Paseky near Rožnov, and one night he tapped on the windowpane. I really loved the gold clasp that he wore on his tie. I was about four years old, and I kept playing with it. I never saw him since, of course. And me mother served as a messenger. She took messages and other things. I remember, when I was about five, we got up one day and went into the wood. Mum told me to sit down by a spruce and to wait, that she’d be back in a bit. She was taking a bag of food to the partisans. I remember it like it was yesterday. Mum was in touch with Mrs Stromšíková in Rožnov, who warned her that the Germans were after her, that she should send me somewhere safe. She couldn’t send me to Granny because she lived in a wooden cottage in the mountains, where her sons and families lived. So she put me into a children’s home for orphans in Rožnov. Soon afterwards the SS came and took her away. It was in summer, and I was visiting the old lady when suddenly someone came from Rožnov and told Granny that the Gestapo had taken [Mum].”

  • “I was friends with this one girl, and she was to go clean the huge cooker in the middle of the kitchen. It was scrubbed with emery. I went to help her, so we could go play in the yard sooner. Suddenly, the door opened, and my mummy stood there. Just imagine, I recognised her by her teeth, which they somehow failed to punch out of her. She had magnificent teeth, she came into the corridor, smiled, and I recognised her immediately. Well, so we started. Then when we came back home, we had just one room, which had a bed with no mattress on it, no straw mat, an empty wardrobe, and one small larder. So we started right from scratch. Mum was very ill. We slept in one bed, and I’d wake up in the night because I’d feel something ice-cold lying next to me. She wasn’t dead, she was that ill. So we kept going to various doctors. Then she began working at Mop, which was a stockings factory in Rožnov. So I went there with her. I’d lie down under the table, and then when I was bigger, I helped her. I paired stockings.”

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    Olomouc, 28.11.2016

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Mum came into the corridor and smiled, and I immediately recognised her by her beautiful teeth

Ludmila Vlachová v roce 1983
Ludmila Vlachová v roce 1983
zdroj: archiv bezpečnostních složek

Ludmila Vlachová, née Koláčková, was born on 30 April 1937 in the village of Vidče as the only child of Karel and Marie Koláček. Bother her parents were active in the resistance during World War II. Her father was arrested for his activities, and following a failed attempt to escape from prison, he was executed in Wrocław in April 1944; her mother was imprisoned in Ravensbrück concentration camp for nearly two years. Before her arrest, her mother hid Ludmila in a children‘s home in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, where she remained until the end of the war, when they were happily reunited. In 1951 her mother married again, and the family moved to Olomouc.