Zdeňka Šillerová

* 1944

  • „The Germans were trying to escape to the West and they took a wrong turn at the crossroads and they wanted to get back. They drove to that bridge, they wanted to go back, and they drove just right on the mines. The house was damaged, uncle was allegedly hit by eighty pieces of shrapnel from the waist up, they removed one of his eyes straight away. Grandma lost an eye and grandpa was in the garden where the Germans were camping and he went to have a look to the garden during the night. He agreed on things with them, he said, so that there would be no trouble, those were young men, sixteen or seventeen when they were enlisted. And that’s how he escaped it. Grandma and uncle were in the back room when it hit, that amount of shrapnel, and the soldiers in the tank, they died in the fire. And because it was a blackout and we were on the floor and the window was covered by a big woolen blanket, it held back the shrapnel so nothing happened to us here in that small room.“

  • “That uncle worked in Zbrojovka in Brno, he married to Svitávka and he worked in Brno and I don’t know in which year they arrested them, how many of them were there, only one survived, he was injured. But there’s the name of the person who snitched on them. They organised fundraisers for the women whose husbands were arrested, something like this. So he was [imprisoned] in Brno and then in Auschwitz. Aunt was a widow, he did not have a father and then they sent just a box of ash from the concentration camp and that was it. So they placed it in a small grave in Svitávka.”

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    Sebranice, 23.09.2020

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    duration: 01:32:56
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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Family tragedy on the last day of the war

Zdeňka at school in 1957
Zdeňka at school in 1957
photo: Archiv pamětnice

Zdeňka Šillerová was born on the 4th of April in 1944 in Sebranice near Boskovice as the second-born daughter of František and Marie Hanákovi. During the First World War, her grandfather, František Slavíček, worked as a chauffeur for the Löw-Beer family who built several textile factories in the nearby Svitávka. Her uncle, Josef Slavíček, collaborated with the resistance in the Zbrojovka factory in Brno. He was arrested, imprisoned in the infamous Kounic Dormitories and in 1942, he died in the Auschwitz extermination camp. During the night from the 8th to the 9th May of 1945, German light tank destroyer drove over a crate of ammunition and the explosion caused a considerable material damage. There were casualties as well. Zdeňka’s uncle, František Slavíček, was gravely injured and lost his sight, her grandmother lost one eye. The parents with their two small children, Zdeňka and Marie, were in the adjoining room and they were saved by the heavy blackout curtaining. After finishing the basic school, Zdeňka apprenticed in the Tylex factory in Letovice and in 1960, she got married. She and her husband, Miloš Šiller, had two daughters, Zuzana and Ivana. In 1966, they moved to Karviná to the newly built residential neighbourhood. For several years, she worked as a cook in a kindergarten and her husband worked in the Karviná coal mines. Later on, she took courses on an institute for higher learning in social and legal matters and then she worked for the Union of the Disabled Citizens as an accountant. After her divorce in 1972, she and her daughters moved back to Sebranice. She survived a serious illness and after the Velvet Revolution, she played a part in founding the Boskovice museum. In 2020, she lived in her own in Sebranice, in the house where she was born.