I hate Hitler because he took my dad
Stáhnout obrázek
Hildegarda Stříbná, maiden name Hanzlíková, was born on October 6. 1939 in Kobeřice in the Hlučín region. She was a blue-eyed child. Due to prolonged health problems, doctors did not give her mother Augusta much chance to conceive. When Hilda was finally born and the young couple had the baby girl baptised in the Neo-Gothic Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Kobeřice, the war began. Father František received his conscription order and left to fight as a German soldier. Historians estimate that twelve thousand other men from Hlučín had a similar fate. Hildegarda remembers her father very little. During her lifetime, she only saw him for a few days when he came to her home village from the front on leave. In January 1945, František Hanzlík was killed on the Eastern Front in what is now Latvia. The mother was left alone with her daughter and earned her living as a seamstress. Together, in the spring of 1945, they experienced the passing of the war front. Hiding in a neighbour‘s cellar, they witnessed the retreat of German troops, family tragedies, air raids on the village, the imprisonment of captured German soldiers and the threat of the Soviets. After the war, the village returned to peaceful life. After graduating from the burgher school, Hildegarda started working as a labourer in Krnov and later moved to a factory in Chuchelná. She met her future husband Arnošt Stříbný and married him in 1962. They had three daughters together. Arnošt worked as a mine electrician at several mines in Ostrava and Hildegarda was involved in the completion of the primary school in Kobeřice in the 1970s. She was not very interested in politics, she was first and foremost a mother. She and her husband raised their children in the Catholic faith and all sang in the church choir. In 2023, Hildegarda Stříbná lived in the family house in Kobeřice, which she and her husband built with the help of the whole family.
