"My neighbour had said: 'You know what, girls? Let's go to Polda.' So we set out for the road while they were already rushing back home. Both of them were bitten. Raped. So they rushed in. The sister, bitten and raped, ran to her cottage with her tenant."
"How did people respond to the Hlučín region becoming part of Germany?" - "They were content. It was still before the war and nobody knew what was ahead of them. There was no public outrage. To the contrary. People welcomed them with flowers. Really, they welcomed them because everyone believed things would get better."
"Each and every family had someone at the battlefront. Sometimes four, sometimes five people. My father would have also had to go, had he not had one leg shorter. Both of my brothers went. In each family there were dead and wounded. In each and every family, each and every house. And the bigger the family, the more people they lost."
Gabriela Hluchníková was born on 1 November 1928 in Dolní Benešov in the Hlučín region as the youngest of six children. Her father was a WW I legionary who later made a living trading cattle. In October 1938, following the incorporation of the Hlučín region to the Third Reich, Gabrial Hluchníková was awarded German citizenship. Between 1938 and 1940 her two brothers Karel and Erhart were drafted to the Wehrmacht. In 1942 Erhart fell in Russia near Lake Ilmen. In April 1945 she witnessed the heavy fighting in the course of the Ostrava-Opava operation as well as the battlefront crossing Dolní Benešov. She hid before the Soviet soldiers and witnessed mass raping of women. After the end of the war she regained Czechoslovak citizenship.
