Jarmila Cardová

* 1936

  • „The expulsion of people there [v Javorníku] was pretty wild. The first batch of Czechs who came there after the war were mostly gold diggers who wanted to acquire property. At night, they [the Germans] would drive them out of their houses and take them away. There was a camp in Javorník where either English or French prisoners were previously imprisoned, and then the Germans were imprisoned there. They were old people, because all the young people from the age of fifteen were at war. Only the old and the sick remained, and they were treated cruelly in the camp. I walked past to school. They were taking revenge for what they heard was happening in the concentration camps. Then they did it to them too."

  • "My father was then transferred to Travná. After the war, however, there were no teachers, no school. There were no buses, even though it was six kilometers to Javorník. And everything was still uncertain. Different people were hiding in the woods, so my parents were worried about me and put me in a monastery in Javorník. It used to be a convent school because the nuns were the teachers. And after the war, they put all the abandoned children from the neighborhood, who had perhaps lost their parents, into the monastery. There were a lot of us children [girls]. The book Bílá Voda was recently published, in which the author also writes about it. We didn't have a bad time there. We were treated well there. The only thing that bothered me was that we had to get up at five o'clock and at six we had to go to church to pray. It was cold there and we didn't even have proper clothes after the war. That bothered us, otherwise we had quite a good time there."

  • "It happened that they dropped a bomb on us when we went to church in Hustopeče on Sunday. I remember wearing white dress. A whole bunch of us went to church and some gentleman threw me into the ditch and lay on top of me. Of course I was dirty afterwards, so I came home crying that I had been thrown in the mud. The war was not pleasant. As children, we didn't really realize it, but we still experienced such things as shots being fired above us, English planes fighting with German ones."

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    Ostrava, 28.07.2022

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The war tore the family apart. Men had to go to the Wehrmacht, women to deportation

Jarmila Cardová / 1954
Jarmila Cardová / 1954
photo: Archive of the witness

Jarmila Cardová was born on March 10, 1936 in Javorník in Silesia. Her mother came from a German family. Her father was Czech and a member of the Czechoslovak financial guard. He guarded the border in the Rychlebské hory near Javorník. Before the annexation of the Sudetenland to Germany, on September 22, 1938, he experienced an ambush by members of the Sudeten German terrorist corps Freikorps. They captured him and took him to prison in Germany. After a month, he was released thanks to a prisoner exchange. Jarmila and her mother also ended up in a German prison for a short time. Her father was then transferred to Vysoké u Hustopečí nad Bečvou, which was part of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia from 1939. Jarmila lived there during the German occupation and liberation. After the war, the family returned to Travné u Javorníku, where her mother came from. There she experienced the deportation of the Germans, which even her family did not escape. Her three aunts and cousins were deported to Germany. Her grandma was eventually released from the internment camp. After 1948 and the abolition of the Financial Guard, the family moved to Bílovka in Nový Jičín area. Jarmila graduated there in 1954. Then she taught at an elementary school until her retirement. She was active in the physical education unit and the tourist section. In 2022, she lived in Bílovec.