“I had a fairly new white coat, I got it for my birthday. I was so proud of it being so beautiful. And I had a green spotted dress and that's what I was wearing. That's how the tricolor was shining on the white. My mother used to tell me: "Listen, Slávka, some German will beat you up there, you will see!" They are brawlers, don't tease them, enjoy it home and don't wear it to Znojmo.' Well, they all had them, so I had to have them too, but the fact that it was shining out bright on me in particular stitched to my coat, that didn't struck me, you know. And I was running over and suddenly the German flied out, he could have been, just wait, I was the fourteenth, going to be fifteenth. Well, I used to be fifteen. So he flew out behind the chapel around me and now he jumped at me, grabbed me by it and ripped it yelling. He didn't know Czech very well, "I'll give you, you Czech pig, you..." He couldn't tell you that. He tore away the whole lapel of my coat.”
"He was then locked up, they had to do forced labor. He finished school, was supposed to start working, and went to the Reich instead. He spent a year in the Reich, and there some silly guys bought a radio, listened to foreign radio, someone turned them in and he served five years, three years in prisons. The last year he met his teacher there, imagine that. They brought a teacher there from another camp. He recognized his teacher, so after the liberation they left together."
"When I was driving through Brno from Králova Pole, they were executing our Czech people in Brno, and we only knew that there were executions, because every lamppost, every lighting, everywhere, signboards, had red twine written in large black letters , who was executed. You know, and that was sad. I was executed there by my class teacher, a doctor to whom I went as a child with childhood illnesses. You know, it was terribly sad. Well, when we got to school, everything was quiet. No shenanigans like girls, boys do. Well, we were just girls, but they also know how to throw things around. But that, that was just terribly sad.'
Boleslava Achrerová, née Chalupníková, was born in Moravské Budějovice on February 13, 1922. From 1937 she studied at the family school in Znojmo, where there was obvious tension between Czechs and Germans. After the start of the war, she transferred to school in Brno, where she experienced the bombing of the city and perceived the executions of Czechs that took place there. Her later husband Otakar was totally deployed in the Reich during the war and imprisoned for three years for listening to foreign radio. After the war, they married and raised two children. Boleslava worked as a teacher all her life. In 2022, she lived in Myslibořice.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
