PhDr. Libuše Geryková
* 1938
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"We moved into the headmaster's flat, for example, there was a monastery across the street from us, which suddenly emptied out in 1950/51. There were hundreds of nuns there, they moved them somewhere to the Králíky in North Moravia, to the Jeseníky Mountains, to Bílá Voda, they also moved the convent out. On the other side there were Franciscans who never came back, they died out. The nuns returned after 1989. The convent had a house next to the school, where we lived in the headmaster's apartment. Every evening, when it got dark, an anton [slang term for a police vehicle designed to transport detainees or prisoners – trans.] or whatever they called it would always come and they took people out and kicked them and yelled at them, but not loudly, so they couldn't be heard. They brought them in secretly and interrogated them. We don't know what was going on there. We were forbidden to sit on the fence and be there. When the car arrived, we had to go home and my father scolded us about what would happen if he, as the director, had to claim responsibility for us that we were sitting there watching something we were not supposed to see. Still, we went there and hid in the bushes to see if they would come again. It was the State Security centre in Kroměříž. We were afraid that something like that would happen to our father."
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"The Romanians were the first to liberate us, they came on such small horses, they rode up. They were digging trenches, we lived on Vrchlického Street, in a very nice part of town. The trenches were very deep and they were to prevent the troops from spreading around the town or I don't know what good it did. We, as kids, used to run there, even though we weren't allowed to. Since then, we have one very sharp knife that we found there. Then the Russians came, they had a truck, some kind of a GAZ, a big truck. Our house had this underpass, a big entrance, so they were standing with the car in that entrance. They were staying in various private rooms. There was one who lived next door, and when he was washing in the morning, we watched through a hole in the fence as he was getting ready. He had a basin with cold water, he took off his watches, both his hands were full of watches, he took them off, with such love, then he washed himself and put them back on, he was robbing the dead ones, apparently."
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"When Vyškov was bombed, you could see it from the floor of the school. It was a one-storey building. From the top you could see half the sky, red, all the way to the horizon. Vyškov was on fire, because it was probably bombed, and my parents forced me to go down. I went down. My parents stayed upstairs and watched through the closed and open windows. Suddenly it exploded, I started screaming downstairs, and they came down all bloody, bruised. It was simply a bomb blast, a bomb. With the pressure that spread, it threw them from those windows to the wall, over the benches they flew to the wall and to the door. They were just all bruised up, and that was the end of their observation of the bombing of Vyškov, I remember it like today, but I wasn't up there when they experienced that pressure wave."
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Full recordings
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Olomouc, 10.09.2022
(audio)
duration: 02:46:41
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Olomouc, 01.10.2022
(audio)
duration: 03:27:14
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We were getting a court notice every month to move out of the apartment
Libuše Geryková, nee. Ingrová, was born on 11 November 1938 in Kroměříž to parents Theodor and Štěpánka Ingrová, the youngest of three children. Her father, an agricultural engineer, later supplemented his education by studying a pedagogical minimum, working as a teacher and headmaster. Her mother taught at the primary school. Father was drafted during the World War I, fighting on the Western Front. He lost his sense of smell at the Battle of Verdun due to the use of Yperite. In 1952 he was dismissed as headmaster of the agricultural school and the family had to leave the headmaster’s flat. Libuše Geryková was admitted to the eleven-year school in Kroměříž, where she graduated in 1956. She studied Russian language and English language at the Department of Education of the Faculty of Arts of Palacký University in Olomouc from 1956 to 1960. In 1965 she married Ing. Milan Geryk, a worker at the Přerov engineering works. In 1967 they had a daughter. In 1969 she received her PhD. In the revolutionary year of 1989, she led the Civic Forum at the grammar school. For most of her professional life she taught at the Přerov grammar school, after retirement she worked at the language school in Kroměříž and at the Archbishop’s Grammar School. She devoted a total of fifty years of her life to teaching. In 2022, at the time of recording, she lived in Přerov.
