Květoslava Chřibková

* 1938

  • "There were three of them, two of them were already of age and the brother was a minor. At home, we didn't know anything about their plans. Someone must have turned them in, so they failed. After the conviction it was cruel, we couldn't even send him parcels. When I was in high school, my parents got a letter saying they could visit him. Because my father was a choleric, my mother decided that I would go with her to visit. It took us three days to get there. I don't know exactly where it was, but I think it was somewhere around Karlovy Vary. There were a lot of other families who made the same trip. Then they took us by bus from the train station to this area. There were mostly women with small children everywhere. Suddenly a long convoy of what looked like circus cars with bars arrived. They stopped in front of us and we each had to look for our own convict. After that we were only allowed a quarter of an hour-long meeting. Because there were so many children, there was only crying and screaming everywhere. It made me feel terribly bad at the time. We couldn't even shake hands or give him any kind of a present."

  • "I had a brother who was nine years older and then one who was six years older. When he was 17, he apprenticed as an upholsterer in Bruntál. We didn't listen to foreign radio much at home, but one day a neighbour came running in saying that the Austrian station had just reported that my brother Norbert and his friends had been caught at the border. Before she could finish, the commando team arrived to our house, and now it all started. They threw everything out, looked for weapons. Someone turned the boys in because they wanted to escape to the West."

  • "Because my uncle was in that war, his family was entitled to a farm worker, everyone in the village got a farm worker. Our family had one from Russia - Ivánek. He was a very nice boy, young, he didn't want to come back [to Russia – trans.]. None of them wanted to come back because people here treated them normally, not as prisoners. They were hard-working, they did farm work in the fields. But then as the front came, they had to go with them. Who knows how they ended up. Someone said they were liquidated right away, someone said they got back to Russia, but we never found out."

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    Ostrava, 25.09.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 01:54:46
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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When she visited her brother in the communist prison, there were screams and cries everywhere

Květoslava Chřibková, school-leaving photo, 1956
Květoslava Chřibková, school-leaving photo, 1956
photo: archiv Květoslavy Chřibkové

She was born as Květoslava Robenková on 12 May 1938 in Ludgeřovice in the Hlučín region. Her father Otto Robenek worked in Germany before the war, then in a munitions factory in Ostrava. She completed her first grade in a German school. At the age of seven she experienced the end of the war and the crossing of the Soviet-German front in the village. When she was eleven years old, her older brother and his two friends tried to escape to Austria. Norbert Robenek was sentenced to many years in prison. She did not see her brother again until she was in high school. The first time she and her mother went to see him, they had to make a journey across the whole country. They found Norbert thin and haggard. Brother Norbert went to several prisons, including Ostrov, Mírov and Jáchymov. He was released in 1956, but served two more years in the army. The brother’s reputation dragged with the family for years to come, and whenever something happened in the village, their family was the first to be suspected. Květoslava Chřibková graduated from the Secondary Medical School in Ostrava, as one of the first students to graduate in the new field - laboratory technician. She spent most of her professional life at the health centre in Hlučín. She married Bernard Chřibek, with whom she had three daughters. In 2021 she lived in Hlučín.