Wonderful years of life spent in Forced labor deployment
Stáhnout obrázek
Irena Votrubcová comes from Plzeň, where she was born on 26 August 1923 to her parents Anna and Rudolf Pecka, who owned a ladies‘ tailoring shop in Barrandova Street. The young Irena decided to follow in their footsteps professionally and also trained as a ladies‘ dressmaker. Her expertise, skill and family experience helped her greatly in her youth when she was (as part of the mass conscription of the 1921 to 1924 class) in Forced labor deployment in the textile plant of the Bosch concern in Bamberg, Germany. She worked under good conditions and remembers her time of Forced labor deployment fondly. She escaped from Bamberg, along with a group of others, about a month before the end of the war when the massive Allied bombing began. On the way home, she survived the bombing of an underground shelter by lucky chance. After her secret return to her homeland, she hid in the village of Nedanice with her great-aunt, due to a well-founded fear of arrest. She subsequently stuck to her tailoring craft all her life, even in the later socialist era, when she made a living as a lecturer of sewing courses in the Park of Culture and Recreation in Plzeň. She married the economist Jaromír Votrubec, with whom she had sons Jaromír (1951) and Lubomír (1957). All her life she and her family lived on Klatovská třída in Plzeň, from where she moved to the St. Elisabeth Home in Plzeň na Slovanech in May 2019.
