Olga Kurfürstová

* 1927

  • “After that, he just went home and he stayed home. It was weird, as my sister was quite young, so we had to keep an eye on her, so she wouldn't see him. We had a harmonium, so his friends from the village made this shelter for him beneath it. There was this rail, so in case the Gestapo would come, he would just hide down there and slide it over his head. It was a perfect hideaway. But in the end, Gestapo came. And I'm still blaming myself for that. I was restless, so I went to answer the door right away, and my father didn't have time to hide. So I'd been blaming myself that we were all arrested.”

  • “They didn't interrogate me. They did interrogate my father, but I couldn't recall whether they had interrogated my mother. But there were no ugly things happening to me in prison. I was scared of the commander of the prison, as he was drunk all the time. I had to pluck feathers for the Gestapo. And I was kinda snotty, you know, so I found it quite humiliating, that I had to pluck some feathers. Once, I even had to go to the city, to wash the floor at Gestapo offices. And I remember those tears of humiliation, as I was kneeling over the bucket.”

  • “There was this warden, Henschel was his name, he was a decent man. And he let us out, telling us that the prisoners from solitary confinement would be at the yard, walking. And that we should look for our father, as he would be there for sure. My father was almost blind, his retina was deteriorating, and as he was watching us in this small window above, he didn't see the commander of the prison walking by, so he didn't take his cap off. And he slapped him so hard that the cap just fell off his head.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Mohelnice, 11.09.2020

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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    Mohelnice, 15.09.2020

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There were sick people lying around, even dead people with those yellow heels, each with a number on it.

Olga Kurfürstová in 1947
Olga Kurfürstová in 1947
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Olga Kurfurstová was born on November 8, 1927, in Zábřeh as the eldest child of Olga and Jaromír Homola. In 1934, the family moved to a village of Komňátka in the Šumperk region, where her father got a job as a class teacher. During the Second World War, her father joined the resistance and Olga had been helping him with carrying confidential messages. During an extensive raid in the summer of 1944, Gestapo came to arrest Jaromír Homola. He managed to avoid being arrested and he went into hiding for several months. He created himself an elaborate hideout in his flat, under a harmonium. Despite that, he couldn‘t escape being arrested, and Gestapo came even for his wife and his daughter, Olga, just seventeen years old at that time. They both spent three months in Gestapo prison in Šumperk. Her father had been taken to the Small Fortress in Theresienstadt, where he eventually contracted typhoid fever, so he managed to get home only several weeks after the end of the war. In 1947, Olga married Jaroslav Kurfurst, who reportedly joined a partisan unit operating in the Bouzov region during the war. Her husband had been a Czechoslovak Railway employee, so their family had to move often because of that. They had been living in Dolní Lipová, in Stření, in Červenka and in Olomouc. Olga Kurfurstová didn‘t hide her resentment towards the Communist regime and she often expressed her opinion in public. In 1988, she took part in protests in Olomouc, demanding Catholic activist Augustin Navrátil to be released from a psychiatric hospital, and a year later, she signed the ‚Just a Few Sentences‘ manifesto. After her husband‘s demise, she moved to Mohelnice, where she had been living in 2020, when the interview was conducted.