Marie Mikolášková

* 1929

  • "We had a lot of German refugees. We hadn't gone to school since Christmas and there were these refugees at school. There were old people, young girls and young women with small children, they were in that school. They were cooking there too, everything. And the Russians started coming there to see them and the women were afraid of them. They were taking the Russians, the girls, to the barns. And so they hid them in the straw under their heads as they slept, and they found out. And there were three priests. And in the rectory there were bars in the windows. And now we woke up in the night and such a cry, 'Help! Help!', and there was one priest who knew Russian and he was shouting it in Russian. The Russians were breaking in, they knew that the priest had hidden the girls, that he had taken them to the rectory. So they went there. I know my dad said, 'Lie down, we have low windows in case they hit here. Don't even raise your heads!' And he crossed the road on all fours and got to the gendarme station. And they went. There was this general staying with a farmer, or whatever it was, some guy from the army, the commander. So they woke him up and told him... they were shooting at the windows of the rectory when they couldn't get in. So he stopped it all, it turned out all right. But I was always worried about my dad."

  • "Then they brought him to Chrášt'any. It was Sunday, and people came out, so many people from the church, and they put a box for him in that area. They put him on it and put a sign around his neck: 'I am a traitor to the nation.' And this Máňa Marhounová, they were our neighbors, and her father died in that concentration camp in Auschwitz. So she stood in front of him and she cursed him, in front of those people, she wasn't afraid and she said: 'You murderer, you killed our father!' Well, there it was, people were crying and no one helped themselves. So they just brought him there for a while, the police, and then they took him to Budejovice. And they took her, she was alone, she was German. So they took her to Koloděje to a state farm, where she cleaned cows. And she deceived them, she told them that she had nothing to wear, that she was cold and needed to go to Chrášt'any to get clothes, to her flat, so they let her go. And she went across the river, as it was frozen and there were holes for fish, so she jumped in and drowned. She saw that it was over. When he was gone too."

  • "They avoided him and people were afraid of him. Then it broke out when it happened in Lidice, and then a week later a little girl in the next village had a funeral, she died of diphtheria. There is a custom there that people from the surrounding villages are buried in the cemetery in Chrastany and in the church. And he went with the funeral procession. And on the morning before the funeral, several trucks arrived with SS men, and they had large metal barrels on them. We didn't know what was inside, but later we found out it was gasoline, and that Chrášťany were meant to be like Lidice. That he had denounced that they had people with guns there. And so they started looking for the weapons. They went from house to house and cut into mattresses and hay, looking for weapons."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Bechyně, 19.02.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:31:48
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Bechyně, 14.03.2023

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    délka: 01:12:45
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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First they took the bells out of the village and then all the Jews

Marie Mikolášková, 20 years old, 1949
Marie Mikolášková, 20 years old, 1949
zdroj: Archive of the witness

Marie Mikolášková, née Zemanová, was born on 23 December 1929 in Chrášt‘any near Týn nad Vltavou in the family of the blacksmith František Zeman. The Zemans were friends with the local Jewish Springer family. At a time when the rights of Jews in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were severely restricted, Marie and her entire family helped them. At the end of the war, she witnessed the violent behaviour of the Soviet soldiers-liberators. In 1951 she married Miroslav Mikolášek and together they raised two sons. A strong believer, she kept her faith even during the communist totalitarianism. Because of her faith, her son had trouble getting into college. She herself has completed only general school and has not received higher education. All her life she worked as a canteen worker at the Silon company in Sezimovo Ústí, and in retirement she earned extra money as a cleaner at the primary school in Chrášt‘any. In 2023 Marie Mikolášková lived in a home for the elderly in Bechyně.