“We were as quiet as mice under Hitler. For God’s sake, not a word, keep low. There was one association there, and they wanted to [get in touch - ed.], so they greeted us, my husband showed his Czech passport, so they left, they didn’t understand. We didn’t want to bring attention to ourselves, we kept low all the time. When some Czech visited Hamburg to learn German, we met up with them. But no one knew that we had spent the evening together. I have to be quiet, keep low like a mouse in its hole, then you’ll be safe. Go home straight after work and don’t take notice of anyone. I didn’t belong there any more, when we married, I had a Czech [passport]. There were at least 2,000 [Czechs] there. We would meet up for some party, but then they [authorities] banned us from organising any Czech event. So we all kept low, we’d only meet up outside by the waterside, we’d go for a swim and kind regards. We didn’t speak of it at all.”
“We had lunch in the pub, and one man said: ‘Take Sněžník, your children aren’t little.’ He wanted to work [at the lodge] as a handyman. We managed to get up there, but he didn’t. They insisted that we go up there. My husband had phoned there, we knew who owned the lodge. So we walked up there on 30 March, it was still all snowed up. And then it was awfully cold, it was empty for three days...”
“[My husband] had his export business, then they shut everything up. He had some other work after that. He had to close [the firm] of course, it all went to the Communists. He had it for three years, and then he had to close it down. And then we moved out [of Prague], I didn’t want to live there any more.”
“I was born in Hamburg in 1915, during the war. It ended when I was three and a half. We were still living with my grandma when all the men returned. So we went for a walk with him [my father], I learnt that that’s who [my father] was, because there were no men during the war.”
Liselotte Nováková was born on 28 March 1915 into a German family in Hamburg. In 1939 she married the Czech Otto Novák. They lived through the war together in Hamburg. During an air raid in 1941 the house in which the family lived in with their six-month-old daughter burned down. The Nováks survived through to the end of the war in temporary accommodation, and in May 1945 they moved to Prague. When the Prague Uprising broke out, her experience with air raids caused Liselotte Nováková to take her two children to the relative safety of Nepomuk. She soon adapted herself to life in Czechoslovakia, she learnt to speak Czech within half a year. In 1948 her husband‘s company was confiscated, after which they both worked at a bottling factory. In 1962 the Nováks left Prague and settled down in Staré Město pod Sněžníkem. They were employed as forest workers, and in 1964 they left to administer a mountain lodge on the slopes of Králický Sněžník. They made considerable improvements to the lodge, but all the same it was closed down in 1968, supposedly for being in bad condition. The lodge had been neglected by its operator, the enterprise Restaurants and Canteens, but this was probably because the company had other priorities. The Nováks found employment in the Králiky District - first at the Tesla plant, and then at a post office. The couple lived in Brníčko near Zábřeh. An accident in 2011 has confined Liselotte Nováková to a wheelchair. On 28 March 2015 she celebrated her one-hundredth birthday.
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!
