Marie Frištenská

* 1935

  • "So mom was lying there and the grandfather thought she was going to die. She was thirty-five years old, so the grandfather was very sad about it. Two days after it happened to mom, he went to the cattle. People were shouting at him: 'Koutny, don't go there, the planes are coming.' He waved his hand and went. He came to the farm, took the hay, went to take care of the cattle. Meanwhile, Russian planes flew over. One shell hit the place where the radio was. There was a fire. They missed the tank. They hit our house, where there was nothing. But it killed the grandfather. Maybe if he'd gone into the barn, he could have saved himself. But he was in the yard, unfortunately. There was hay next to him and he was lying there dead. When it calmed down, they all came out and saw that it was on fire, it was broken. So they went there and found the old man."

  • "That was before, because two days before they bombed it, it was still so quiet in the village. So people started coming out of the houses. Even my mother came out. She was unloading with the neighbours, and suddenly boom. A grenade fell over two houses from us. It shattered, twelve people were injured. My mom the most. She caught a shrapnel in her neck. She fell and broke her neck. So now what? She was bleeding. We didn't know what to do. We dragged her to the basement. She was screaming, poor thing. What a horror. We were looking for help. We found out there was a German doctor in the village. The old woman, shooting, not shooting, she flew to get the doctor. He really came. But he wouldn't go to the cellar. He wanted my mother to be taken upstairs. That was horrible, when I think about it. So they dragged her, poor thing, again. They put her on the bed in the living room. The doctor said it was broken. A disaster. They stacked big slabs. They put her leg in a splint, tied the plates to it. He treated her and then we had to wait for the war to end. If she didn't die she had to go to the hospital."

  • "I lived through the war, I was ten years old at forty-five. It was really horrible because the war ended between the towns of Čehovice and Pivín and we were in the town of Čehovice. Grandparents had a farm there. Two cows, goats, pigs. During the war we were in the cellar of my aunt's house, they had a little better cellar. Grandfather was in the First World War, so he knew what it was like. So he and the neighbours dug bunkers that they would all hide there, but in the end everybody stayed in the cellar. We were in the cellar too. You couldn't get out, it was horrible. The neighbors and I dug a hole. They had potatoes, milk, we gave each other food. Because grandfather had two cows, he used to milk them to get milk. But it was terrible, the Russians were already driving the Germans away, and the Germans had a radio in Chehovice, where our farm was. And they had a German tank across the house. The Russians found out, so they wanted to destroy it. That was the last glimmer."

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If you weren‘t doing anything, they couldn‘t get at you

Marie Frištenská at work in the breeding station, 1950s
Marie Frištenská at work in the breeding station, 1950s
zdroj: Archive of the witness

Marie Frištenská was born on 18 June 1935 in Prostějov. Her father, František Vysloužil, ran a general store in Bedihost. She spent the last days of the war on her grandparents‘ farm in Čehovice. There was fighting between the Red Army and the retreating Germans. A shell wounded her mother, Maria Vysloužilová, and her grandfather, Alois Koutný, was killed in the last days of the war. After 1948, the Communists deprived her father of his trade and he was imprisoned for several months. Because of this, Marie was unable to study and had to take up an apprenticeship at the Oseva breeding station. She married Zdeněk Frištenský, nephew of the famous wrestler Gustav Frištenský. His family was deprived of their farm in Bedihost by the communists. Marie and Zdeněk worked as managers of a recreation centre in Trojanovice in the Beskydy Mountains. Several relatives of the Frištenský family emigrated and during the years of normalisation, both of her sons, František and Zdeněk, went abroad.