"They came to work, they called me to the reception. It was a young man and he asked me, 'Did you go by a tram?' I confirmed. Then he asked me who I was talking to on the tram. And I said, 'Well, I talked with a lady there, and she's a midwife at Šilhánek's.' It doesn't exist anymore but it used to be a small hospital. And then he asked me what we talked about. And I replied, 'Well... She said that it was summer time and not much was happening, that there weren't many babies being born. And then she talked about her dogs.' 'And you didn't talk about….' Someone wrote 'You communist bastard' on a teacher's door [laughs]. So he asked me if we talked about that. And I said I didn't know about it. That was a long way from where I lived. I asked him what was written on that door but he wouldn't tell me. But I thought, 'Served her well!' [Laughs]. So that was one time when they were questioning me. And my husband, too. Always on some silly matter. It must have been somebody denouncing us. But they didn't know what we were talking about, and we were really talking just about random things. So they were questioning us subtly."
"I remember the raid. When there were air raids, we had to leave the classroom and go down to the basement. One time, when they were sounding the horn, my friend and I didn't want to go to the basement. We ran away and we went to the gate. And the gate had a high handle. We were little, so we pushed each other up, opened it, and we ran home. And that's where the bomb fell. I was passing the house when the bomb fell into the yard, and it slammed me to the ground, and I know I slid down into that basement and I couldn't breathe. They all kept slapping me to bring me out of shock..."
"After about two months, they were allowed to write a letter. It was in German, because the letters were allowed only in German. So the prisoners helped each other to write in German. What was written there? Well, common things - that he was doing well. What else was he supposed to write? My mother said it was strange, that the letter was written by him but the way he wrote it... He asked about children and so on. The Gestapo proof-read it. Then we received a letter saying, 'Dear Mrs. Dosoudilová,' the letter was in German, 'with great regret we have to inform you, that despite all our care and caution your husband died.' They wrote it like that, they were sending such letters."
Bohumila Skočovská, née Dosoudilová, was born on 1 May 1938 in Prostějov. She grew up in Konice in the Prostějov region, where her father, JUDr. Vladimír Dosoudil, was the head of the district court. Her mother Leopolda – who came from Ivanovice in Brno - took care of the household. Her father Vladimír cooperated with the resistance organisation Defence of the Nation (Obrana národa) during the war. Other relatives also had anti-Nazi experience. Her uncle Jan Harašta was a war veteran who made it to England via France, and her cousin Bruno Šubrt was an RAF airman. In 1941, her father was arrested by the Gestapo on the basis of a denunciation. He died the following year in the Mauthausen concentration camp. After her father‘s arrest, Bohumila moved to Brno with her mother and her older brother Vladimír, and spent the end of the war in Chrlice in Brno. In the 1950s, she graduated from the Brno Grammar School. She had various jobs. For the longest time she worked in an institute for physically disabled youth in Kociánka, Brno, from where she retired in 2000. In 1969 she experienced massive protests against the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops and their violent suppression in Brno. She also experienced demonstrations in the centre of Brno during the Velvet Revolution. In 2022 Bohumila Skočovská lived in Brno.
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!
