“I remember most of all the procession. President Gottwald was standing on the grandstand. I was the lead of the youngsters from Ústí, I marched in front and they walked behind me. And all of us commanded: ‘look left!’. So we turned our heads away from the grandstand where the president was standing. It was an act of protest against the president. We got away with it without any punishment.”
„The local broadcast would announce the raids in advance. They used code-words. When they said ‘cuckoo, cuckoo’, the bombers flew across the border, and when they were approaching Steyr, they said ‘marta marta’. Once, we heard ‘marta marta’ we ran out of the factory because we were afraid of the bombing. But the werkschutz members didn’t want to let us out. The crowd went mad and downed the fence. We ran out of the factory and out of the city and we barely managed to take our belongings in the camp. Then we ran into the forest, struggled through the deep snow and came to a building.”
“A body fell on the ground right in front of me. I looked up and I heard them shouting above my head: ‘don’t feel any pity for her, she was the biggest squealer here’. I don’t know if the crowd had thrown her down or if she had jumped herself. She was alive but hurt. I bent down to her but a Russian soldier came, pushed me aside and set her hair on fire. I screamed: ‘Jesus Christ no, please no’, and I wanted to come to her. Somebody pushed me aside and the crowd that stood behind me started yelling: ‘what is this? She’s yet protecting her?’. I took to my heels and I had to do my best in order to escape the frenzied crowd. There was a turned-over tramway in front of Wilson’s train station so I flew into it to hide there. I crawled underneath the bench and was terrified what they would do to me if they had caught me. They might have lynched me as well because the crowd was so infuriated – these were terrible emotions.”
Stanislava Zvěřinová, née Sládková, was born on 2 November, 1924, in České Budějovice. Her father, František Sládek, fought in the First World War in the Czechoslovak legions in Russia. After the war, he worked for the Czechoslovak railways and raised his two daughters to love their homeland. Stanislava graduated from a convent school and the grammar school of J.V. Jirsík in České Budějovice. Since her childhood, she had been actively involved in the activities of the Sokol and the Club of the Czech tourists. After graduating in 1943, she worked at a railway station. On 17 February, 1944, she and her classmates were sent to forced labor in Austria, at first to the armaments factory Steyr-Daimler-Puch in Steyr. After the factory was bombed, the workers were shifted to Vienna-Mödling and Neudorf, where they were employed in a factory producing aircraft engines (Flugmotorenwerke Ostmark). After the destruction of the factory, the production was hidden from further raids in the beer cellars in Vösendorf. The last location where Mrs. Zvěřinová worked became Davle-Libřice near Prague, where the Nazis used the local railway tunnels for the manufacture of aircraft. After she had escaped from forced labor, she came to Prague where she experienced the Prague Uprising of May 1945. After the war, she worked in the accounting department of the railway station in Ústí nad Labem, where she met her husband. In 1952, she went to Prague, found a job at the Czechoslovak State Railways, then in the accounting department of the Ministry of Transportation and finally as a company auditor at the Research Institute of Handling, Transportation, Packaging and Storage Systems. She died on February 24, 2017.
