Ludmila Novotná

* 1935

  • "It was the very last week of the war, we were in the basement. Above the cellar we had a garden about seven meters wide from a field that a farmer had sold to all of us. There was a fence along those seven meters and behind it was a machine gun that kept barking and firing all day and all night." - "What kind of soldiers were there?" - "I don't know if they were Russians or Germans, we weren't allowed to go outside."

  • "There were about sixteen of us girls. Three times we went to a camp where we cooked for ourselves. The last camp was in 1950. Someone found an empty mill in Vrbno pod Pradědem from which the Germans had left. It was a mess, such a mess! We came there for the holidays and decided to make a camp there, so we cleaned the whole mill. They brought lime from somewhere, so we painted the walls with lime to disinfect it. We had a playroom in one room and a bedroom in the other room where we slept. We had straw or hay and blankets on top of that. We cooked in the kitchen. We did it all during the week, we were as grumpy as Bulgarians, and on Sunday the Communists came and told us that it was unhygienic and we couldn't be there. They kicked us out and on Monday they moved a pioneer camp in."

  • "I also remember [the period] before I went to school. There were nurses there [in Nemcice]" - "Nurses? - "The nuns of the Order of the Virgin Mary. They used to go all white, they were never anything but white. When they worked in the garden, they wore a black apron. We used to go there, whether the community paid them or supported them in any way I don't know, but we didn't pay anything. They played with us, taught us to pray, swung us on the swings. When we left, I'll never forget this for the rest of my life, we had to stand in a double line and always set the hand that was in the open space, like beggars, and we said, 'Lord God help us, we'll come again tomorrow'. While we were saying that, the nurse had a big box of cicvar seeds, candies, and she always put a pinch on our palm and we thanked her for that. Other times we would bring dry bread from home and they would spread jam on it for us. Because they had a garden and small fruit, they cooked their own marmalade."

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    Olomouc, 06.04.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:11:01
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The stress of the war has stayed with me to this day.

Ludmila Novotná, 1953
Ludmila Novotná, 1953
zdroj: Archive of the witness

Ludmila Novotná, nee. Zelinková was born on 20 January 1935 in Němčice nad Hanou, part of Hliník, as the fourth of seven children. Her mother Božena, nee Přidalová, was a housewife. Her father, Alois Zelinka, an apprentice carpenter and coachbuilder, ran a trade in Němčice. The whole family also went to work in the fields with the farmers. In 1944, Ludmila‘s mother died of tuberculosis. Due to the infectious stage of her illness, some of her siblings, including Ludmilla, lived in an orphanage in Napajedla from 1941 to 1942. Her father remarried the same year. Ludmila experienced a very harsh upbringing, especially from her father. She lived through the dramatic end of the war in Němčice. After the war she joined the Scouts, which became her lifelong love. She trained as a seamstress at the Prostějov Clothing Factory (OP), where she also worked. Her father‘s trade was nationalized after 1948. When Ludmila was sixteen, her father threw her out of the house after an argument. She went to live in a sublet in Prostějov. In 1953, she married Dalibor Novotny, a professional soldier whose father died as a resistance fighter in the Mauthausen concentration camp. They raised four sons together. Thanks to her husband‘s profession, they moved frequently and lived for a long time in Přerov. She then worked as a postman and kitchen manager in a kindergarten. In 1989 she retired, and for eight years she worked as a cook at the parish of St. Moritz in Olomouc. For a large part of her life she accompanied the blind. In 2023 she lived in Olomouc.