Naděžda Kantová

* 1940

  • "And when we went to the forest, for example, we were ordered not to collect anything in the forest. That there were such boxes or as oval as eggs. And they told us it was grenades or mines, and if we took it in our hand, we would die, it would explode. How many times had I seen them lying by a tree, but it never occurred to me that I would take it, nobody. Then they went and collected it, like adults."

  • "Well, when there was a war, I was actually small, Dad was locked up. He was... I was three years old, so they locked him up for having flyers like the Germans and alike. Well, they locked in a lot of people there, like, I remember my mom and I were going to the city, to the village, and watching them being taken away by truck.”

  • "We always ran away or we went to Petrovice in the fields. And there used to be like fields and always large lanes, so we lay below those lanes. And there were more of us from the village. And the adults told us not to say anything else, or else they would shoot us. Well, the Germans left Třebíč, via Okříšky to Jihlava, and they always set something on fire... they got into a truck, for example, and set the passengers on fire. The tanks were burning along the way, it was just banging, we were crouched, we didn’t say a word. And when we stuck our heads out a little, our parents always pushed us down so that we wouldn't be seen."

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    Jihlava, 26.11.2018

    (audio)
    délka: 28:32
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I saw everything burning, sirens sounding, air raids, and I cannot forget it

Naděžda Kantová (en)
Naděžda Kantová (en)
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Naděžda Kantová was born on August 15, 1940 in Okříšky near Třebíč. Although she was only a small child during the war, she says it marked her for life. Her father, Josef Drholec, was arrested for keeping anti-German leaflets and imprisoned in Buchenwald for two years. He returned from there with tuberculosis and a damaged spine. Naděžda remembers the end of the war - air raids, hiding and grenades that remained in the surrounding forests. She started her first job immediately after leaving primary school, at the age of fourteen. She got married in 1957 and moved with her husband to Brtníky in the Northern Bohemia. She worked there in the Mikov factory in Mikulášovice and at the same time lived right on the border. She does not like to remember the vicissitudes associated with life close to the guarded state border. After three years, she moved from the borderland to Jihlava.