Vlasta Forejtová

* 1938

  • "As soon as the low-flying fighter planes started flying here and the air raids started, we ran for cover. And there, opposite our place, there was a family house, so the people who lived there, they cleaned out the – in those days it was called a senkruvna – which was a cesspit where the sewage went, so they cleaned out the cesspool, and we would climb up the ladder every time there were air raids into that stinking basically cesspit. Which is true, it was a bricked up, covered up, so it was a kind of an ugly room, so that's the one I remember us climbing up that ladder, that’s the only thing. And then I remember when the low-flying fighter planes flew here, and there was a factory just over here, and there was a little forest and a pond by this forest, and the dredgers dug, they dropped bombs there, and dug terrible craters, and I remember those craters, because after the war we played in those craters as children."

  • "The only thing I was present during the time I was still in school in 1944, before my mother took me away from school, was that there was a new school built in 1934 and they took the whole school. The Czech children were divided into the pubs and other free rooms and everything, and there was a Hitler Youth in the whole school. And I remember that when we were going to school or from school and the Hitler Youth was marching around the town, that we Czechs had to stand at attention and we had to pay tribute to those Hitler Youth, those bastards, basically, which were fanatical children and here they were really behaving like soldiers, or they were, they had to behave like soldiers and we had to pay tribute to them. That's what I remember, when we always had to stand at attention and we weren't allowed to move."

  • "We knew who he was, he normally lived here for a few more years after the war, so we used to meet him, everything, but I confess we never told anyone his name and we never mentioned him because it was a human failing at the time. And he also had one only daughter and then somehow around the 50's they moved away from here, so we knew, but I say, my mother and I took it as a human failure. We felt sorry for him because - just because he spoke, he got back from the concentration camp and my father didn't."

  • "My father's interrogations were so harsh that they always beat him in Klatovy and threw him on the concrete floor in the corridor. Well, you can imagine how it was during the winter on the concrete corridor, so my father got pneumonia, and with that pneumonia he was actually sick all the time until Terezín, where he was not interrogated afterwards, but his health was undermined and he survived until the 5th of July. He died at 9:30 AM on May 5, 1945, and at ten o'clock the gates of the fourth yard were opened, the Danish Red Cross came in, and the Danish Red Cross liberated the entire fourth yard, so that all the prisoners who were there were liberated. My father was already dead by nine thirty, we never found out where he is buried, we only have a death certificate, a death certificate that he died in Terezín. And anyway, even if he hadn't died, he had the XYZ mark, that means return unwanted, so he would have been shot."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Březnice, 18.05.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 39:22
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Březnice, 02.08.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 01:30:12
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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We knew who turned my father in, but we took it as a human failing

Vlasta Forejtová, 1956
Vlasta Forejtová, 1956
photo: Archiv pamětnice

Vlasta Forejtová née Kolofová was born on 30 October 1938 in Březnice. Her father, Stanislav Kolofa, worked as a master locksmith on Count Pálffy’s estate in Březnice and was also the commander of the local fire brigade. With the coming of the war, he joined the resistance activities as a commander of the local Obrana národa (Defence of the Nation). In September 1944 he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Březnice and later in Klatovy. To prevent the Gestapo from using little Vlasta as a means of coercion during the interrogation of her father, her mother hid her with various relatives and later in the infectious diseases ward of the hospital in Příbram. In March 1945, her father was taken to the Small Fortress of Terezín to the death row, where he died on 5 May 1945. Vlasta Forejtová recalls the bombing of Březnice at the end of the war and the fighting when German soldiers were passing through Březnice on their way to American captivity. In September 1944, she started primary school in Březnice, and in 1953 she began attending the secondary general education school in Příbram. In 1955 she joined the Communist Party. She married a professional soldier and together they raised two sons. They moved to Rožmital pod Třemšínem, where she worked in a construction company and later as the head of the local cultural centre. In 1975, she moved with her family to Plzeň, where she worked as director of the Městské kulturní středisko (Municipal Cultural Centre) until 1990. Shortly after the revolution, she was fired from her job, and her memories of the Velvet Revolution are not fond. In 1991-1993 she worked in Škoda Plzeň, after which she and her husband returned to Březnice. Until 2020 she was the chairwoman of the Svaz tělesně postižených (Union of the Physically Handicapped) and a member of the regional committee of the Českoslovenští bojovníci za svobodu. She goes regularly to the primary school in Březnice to talk about her father’s fate. At the time of recording in 2022, she was still living in Březnice.