Anna Žátková

* 1937

  • "I saw German soldiers in Slavíč towards the end of the war. I was an Aryan kind of kid. It was in March, I went out to the village square and a German field kitchen came and an SS man got out. He took me in his arms and told me that he had Kristýnka at home and that he hadn't seen her in four years. Of course I was afraid. They were there for a week and then they came to our farm and he always brought me something and I couldn't get it at all... And my grandfather spoke to him in German. And he said, and this was in March, that the Führer was not going to lose the war."

  • "When the war ended, even before, there was bombing in Ostrava. I was always flying somewhere and now I saw a plane flying, smoke behind it. And suddenly I see a soldier who fell down like that. A lot of people saw it, I didn't go there, but my brother and the boys flew there right away. There were people in the field doing something, planting something. And my classmate from Drahotuše came there. He was an American pilot who had his hand turned up and had a gold watch on it. And he stole it from him. He was from Milenov, that's a village a little bit further away, and his sister told him, 'You're going to go there right now and give it back.'

  • "I remember the trip when we went with my dad. There were two ladder trucks. And that was [arranged by] uncle Svoboda. We didn't have ladder trucks like that. I guess he borrowed them and put them together. Then everything was loaded on the wagon. It had to be ordered. Then my grandmother's [household] was picked up. The ladder trucks were loaded high and I was between the two wagons holding on. There in Vyškov they were going uphill and dad said to me, 'Anynka, hold on and don't look anywhere.' I remember seeing something shiny [bending down] and the ladder truck went over my face. Dad immediately took me and went with me to the doctor in Vyškov. My mouth was all wiped. After that, Dad and I took the train. I don't know who took care of the carriages. I came by train to Drahotuše and to Slavíč and my mother said: 'What happened to her?'"

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Ostrava, 18.09.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:47:01
  • 2

    Ostrava, 25.09.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:46:10
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The placement in Ostrava seemed like a punishment

Anna Žátková / around 1948
Anna Žátková / around 1948
zdroj: archive of the witness

Anna Žátková, née Vymazalová, was born on 28 February 1937 in Dědice near Vyškov. Her father was a carpenter. He and his wife built a house in the hamlet of Hamiltony, to which belonged a small farm. Nearby was a military training ground of the Czechoslovak army. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany in 1939, the Wehrmacht occupied the training area. Under the pretext of expanding it, the Reich Protector ordered the eviction of thirty-three surrounding villages, including Hamiltony. The family of the witness was displaced in the first wave in March 1941. Anna and her parents spent the rest of the war and the first post-war years in the settlement of Slavíč near Hranice in the Přerov region. Then she returned to her family home in Hamiltony. She graduated from the newly established rehabilitation worker‘s course at the medical school in Brno. After graduation in 1955, she started working at a hospital in Ostrava-Zábřeh. For six years she worked as a rehabilitation nurse in the burn ward. In 1962 she moved to the newly opened Mining Clinic in Ostrava. Miners from the Ostrava shafts were treated there. Anna Žátková worked there as head nurse of the rehabilitation department. In 2023 she lived in Ostrava-Poruba.