"That's where they stopped the tank. There was only one German. He got out of the tank and went to our dad’s workshop to see him, because my dad had learned German in Vienna, so he understood him and could talk to him. The German said to him, 'I'm out of fuel. The tank is standing there, but it's full of ammunition and I have to destroy it. So I'm going to set it on fire. Open all your windows so they don't break, and run to the basement to hide.' So we ran to the neighbors' basement. It started in the morning, but it was exploding until the evening. Well, the windows didn't break. So the German was kinda decent. But when they were running away, they shot a young boy. They got their revenge."
"I didn't feel any fear until the end of the war, but then we were all very scared. Because we didn't know what they were going to do to us. Well, and then, when the war was over, someone came from another village, they had one rifle and they went to disarm the Germans, they went to the [Sázava] station. But it was cruel back then. The Germans [then] took all our men from the age of fifteen, they all had to go to the station - and we didn't know what would happen to them, whether they would be shot or... But in the end they were reasonable, the Germans, and they let them go home and nothing happened to them. My mother was crying and saying, 'What am I going to do with these children?' In the end everything was okay, as they let them go home."
"And then, when everyone knew that the Germans were going to lose and that the Russians were coming, we were a potato-growing region, a lot of potatoes were grown there, and in every bigger village there were distilleries which made alcohol from those potatoes. And as it was known that the Russians were coming here, the partisans would empty the distilleries at night because they knew that the Russians would drink themselves to death. So people would go there at night trying to get the alcohol. Really crazy."
"There was an officer staying with us, and he was kind. But once a drunk Russian came to my dad and then tried to grab my mom. And then he fell asleep, because he was so drunk. So dad took the revolver out of his pocket and he took the cartridge out. And when the Russian woke up, he tried to pull the trigger, but he couldn't. He wanted to shoot mom. And he kept saying to dad, 'You'll get it! You'll get it!' So dad went to the lieutenant, woke him up and told him to go there, because the soldier was out of his mind. So he got rid of him. He threw him out. He grabbed him by the collar and threw him smashing the door open. Anyway, dad was still at home, so if anything happened, he would have protected mom."
Bohumila Hofmannová, née Hegnerová, was born on July 16 1935 in Sázava in the Žďár nad Sázavou district. She spent her childhood with her parents and ten siblings in Sázava, their father Rudolf Hegner ran a wheelwright and body shop. She witnessed the transformation of the village during the war and post-war years. She experienced partisan attacks in the vicinity of her village at the end of the war and the threat of Nazi retaliation. As a result of the post-war currency reform of November 1945, her family lost all their savings, and her father was never able to replace them as his shop ceased to prosper due to technological progress. She went to an apprentice school to be a seamstress, but for economic reasons she stopped her apprenticeship and took a job at the TOKOZ metal goods factory in Žďár nad Sázavou. In 1959 she got married and moved to Horní Bezděkov near Kladno where her husband lived and where she worked at the Kablo Kladno company and at the Kladno steelworks. Before retiring, she worked in the kitchen of a boarding school in Horní Bezděkov and Kladno. In 2021 Bohumila Hofmannová lived in Horní Bezděkov.
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!
