Herta Vladařová

* 1929

  • "We were four girls at home – at the age of fourteen and fifteen. And they're coming for it, the Russians. My parents were scared. So Dad hid us at his cousin, we were upstairs somewhere in the birdhouse. But then Mom was afraid they would find us, so we went down again. They called at night, so we went, German soldiers were passing through our village, somehow they took turns in the Nové Lublice, some went there, some there and they told us not to stay there, that the first ones wouldn't do anything to us, nothing bad, but others would follow them, and there will be Russians there, and we should really be afraid of them. Those guys have been through it."

  • "Discipline came first. At six o'clock there were whistle. The whistle sounded all day. From half past five in the morning until nine in the evening. Everything was whistled. And we had to jump accordingly. Even into the cold water. It was morning. There was a stream nearby, in that Čihák. The whistle souded loud and we had to get into water. It was such a drill. We learnt an awful lot of things there."

  • "In August 1944, I was with my grandmother. My grandmother lived in Nové Lublice. And I lived in Staré. My grandmother and I were outside, there was the war, we were in the garden, digging, and now suddenly two planes arrived, not very big. She flew in and fought. We had the garden there. One plane started burning and the pilot jumped out, and as grandma was digging there, the pilot came over to her. And his plane, which burned down... There is a forest in Nová Lublice at the end of the village, and there is a huge swamp and the plane crashed right there. I was there first and I saw it it stuck out and it was maybe there for about 50 years. It was still there and only I knew about it."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Vítkov, 20.02.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 54:26
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I hid in the birdhouse from the Russians

Herta Vladařová in 2020
Herta Vladařová in 2020
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Herta Vladařová, née Jüstelová, was born on September 24, 1929 in Staré Lublice near Opava as the third out of nine children. The father worked as a gunner in a quarry, my mother took care of a household and a small farm. After the birth of her last child, her mother suffered a stroke and Herta had to take care of her younger siblings. Herta could not attend secondary school because the family did not have the money to let more children study. After the occupation of the Sudetenland by Nazi Germany, the Jüstels had problems with the local Nazis in the village. At the end of the war, onc again they were afraid of approaching Soviet soldiers. Herta and her sisters first fled with retreating German soldiers, then hid with their Czech cousin. The Jüstels avoided the expulsion as Germans, because his father was recognized as an anti-fascist and, moreover, had an irreplaceable position as a gunner in a local quarry. After the war, Herta worked as a cook. In 1957, she married Josef Vladař and they had three children together.