Marie Blablová

* 1926

  • "After the Germans brought the Russian women prisoners - Toňa, Žena, Aňa and Luba - they put them in the kitchen to work. We were forbidden to talk to them. Although we didn't understand them and neither did they understand us, we later learned how to communicate. Later, when we were scraping potatoes, they told us about the things they had seen during their transport from Russia. About the rivers of blood they had witnessed. Their mothers hid them in a dung heap, so they wouldn't find them. But they found all of them and took them to Kopřivnice, those four girls and four boys, and put them to work in Štraberk. They put them to a wall and we kids – curious as we were - climbed up on the tables and watched from the kitchen's window. They were standing there, face to the wall and we thought, oh my God, what is going on. It was the Russian girls and they put them on a room right next to ours. They blocked the door that connected the two rooms with a wardrobe on each side. We pushed it aside and got in touch with them. We were curious where they were from and what they did. One of them, Olga, studied for a doctor. She later left with the Russians. One of them went out for dates with Czech guys. They had to wear the 'Ost' marking on their clothes, so we passed her our clothes through the kitchen window and when she came back she changed her clothes again. These were experiences you can't even imagine.”

  • "Those boys from Štramberk were partisans, you know, they helped the Englishmen to hide and to leave the country. After the war only one came back, I don't know what happened to the others. We brought them food that we had stolen - I mean carried - from the kitchen. A loaf of bread, some flour and things like that. We never saw them - me and Soňa just left the food at a certain place and they took it. After the partisans helped the Englishmen to escape, the Gestapo drove around, shot and honked and searched building after building for the partisans but they never caught anybody. It was horrible. After the war it turned out that the Englishmen were in fact Scotsmen when they started to walk around Kopřivnice in kilts."

  • "Olga once told me: 'Žeňa is looking kind of fat, usually her skirt mops the floor and now it's around her knees. She's pregnant'. The German woman who was watching her found out about it as well. So the Gestapo arrived and took her away. But she never disclosed the name of the father. But the day before that Kelbl - a German and a member of SS - came with a bottle of wine, sausages and food. He said goodbye and told her not to tell them about him. We overheard their conversation through an open door. Later we found out, that he shot himself in a foundry sewer."

  • [And how was it with the costumes, how did the Scout costumes look like?] "Well, our skirts were brown and the shirts were khaki, just like the brown shirts of the Germans. Little girls had daisies sewn on their shirts, while the bigger ones had swallows. We also had badges, it was all very nice." [And could you tell me the story how your mother hung the laundry?] "Well, whenever she washed our shirts, she hung three of them (we washed one for Lola as well) outside and everybody would greet her 'Heil, Hitler' because they thought it was Nazi shirts even though in fact it was scout shirts. And mom always said: 'I am going to get arrested because of those shirts'. "

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    dům s pečovatelskou službou, Kopřivnice, 15.12.2010

    (audio)
    duration: 01:03:16
    media recorded in project A Century of Boy Scouts
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My mom always used to tell me not to do anything I should be ashamed of

portret.jpg (historic)
Marie Blablová
photo: archiv Marie Blablové

Marie Blablová, née Šumná, was born in Kopřivnice on August 22, 1926. When she was seven years old, she joined her older sister Lída the Girl Scouts in Kopřivnice. She learned many scout skills, went out on trips and to the summer scout camp in Soláň three times. The meetings were usually held at somebody’s house and the khaki shirts were made by their friend. The Scout movement was banned after the Second World War started and the Scouts in Kopřivnice could no longer convene. During the war she worked in a canteen, where together with others, she helped the Russian woman prisoners, brought food to the partisans and money to the prisoners’ families. After the war she left for Brno to take care of her sister Lída, who had gotten married there through a newspaper advertisement, but her husband died during an air strike and she lost a leg herself. She moved back to Kopřivnice after a year and continued to work in a shop. She later got married and had two kids. She never got back to the Scout movement. She currently lives in Kopřivnice.