Jaruška Žolčáková

“This boy, he could have been fourteen or maybe fifteen years old at the most. He was dressed in a tank-crew member uniform and his legs were riddled with bullets. He was just sitting there and holding his machine gun like this. I and my sister, who was some four years older than me, came to that car where he was because he had no idea where they were taking him. So we came to him, looked at him and told him that he we were girls whereas he was a boy. But he wouldn’t understand anyway. We tried to talk to him in our broken Russian. We spoke German but hardly any Russian as our dad taught us German, not Russian, and it was a clever thing to do. Anyway, in our poor Russian, we tried to explain to him that he was safe, that we were nurses and that there was also a doctor there trying to help him. We told him that we would treat his wounds. But he kept repeating: ‘if you touch me, I’ll shoot you to pieces!’ So we experienced a lot of funny stories like that.”

“We’ve never been religious, didn’t go to church or anything like that. So he went to the town hall because he needed them to issue my birth certificate and as we weren’t churchgoers, we went to the town hall. Well and they’d ask my dad: ‘What name is it going to be?’ And he said: ‘Well, Jaruška’. So they put the name Jaruška in my birth certificate. And there it stayed. Thus I’ve been Jaruška for all of my life. I have to say that I do mind a bit. I mean, I’m not putting the blame on my dad but it gets a bit annoying as you get older. When they ask for my name I tell them Jaruška and they’re like ‘OK, and what is it really? Jarmila or Jaroslava?’ So I pull out my ID card and show them. ‘There you go’. And they’re like ‘Oh, alright’, and they put it in the way it’s written on my card.”