Hana Gerzanicová

* 1928  †︎ 2023

  • Remembering the war ------- “I remember World War II, when it started, we worked out that it’s happening, in 1938, I was ten years old. So to begin with, I think that as a child, I didn’t realize what was going on at all. Not until I was older. I remember, say, that we had the ration tickets. Everything was for tickets. So it was difficult to get things. So, we used to have a beautiful garden, but that changed suddenly, we had goats and rabbits. We had pillows with cloth [hidden] inside. There were inspections. So we had to know how to drop it [hide it - ed.]. So we’d trade wool or cloth with the farmers, of course, in change of meat, butter, and so on. Not so much meat, actually, more eggs and butter and the such, honey, for example. Then later on the air raids started. To begin with, the raids were only at night. We had a big wall at the back, we broke it in and also let our neighbours [join in]; it was a matter of life and death, so garden aesthetics be damned, we built a shelter. I attended grammar school at the time, but I’d go home for lunch. But later I’d take a later train to Nezvěstice and I lived at one Mr Vaněk’s in Vlkov. Mr Vaněk had a lot of bees. And because I was there, I had to carry various things home in my satchel - I rode by bike, from Nezvěstice to Vlkov by bike - well, and we also had to smuggle some things... So we’d ride to Nezvěstice, and the [train] conductors, there’d be German soldiers or SS men, they’d be posted at the station to check what people were carrying. There were inspections. And when we were in the train, the conductor would go through the wagons around Šťáhlavy, and he’d say something, but what exactly, I couldn’t say any more, perhaps: ‘Looks like rain,’ but that was a codeword for us: there’ll be inspections. So everyone got out in Koterov and walked. Towards the end of the war there were lots of incendiary bombs. These incendiary bombs were kind of metal, kind of like vinyl, I’d say, they were octagonal or hexagonal, shaped, and it was this kind of tube. Here in the garden, it needed to fall somewhere, and it broke on impact. There was a bomb here beforehand, luckily, that was a time bomb, which has some device in it with the timing, and when that breaks, it doesn’t explode. But that was a horrible feeling, we watched from afar, just in case, and they brought in the political prisoners. And [the prisoners] had to dig it out. Even today I wonder what they must have been thinking, if it exploded they had to dig it out of the ground.”

  • “If someone had told me the day before that I’d leave, I’d think they were crazy. I wouldn’t have dreamt of leaving. I loved the Czech landscape, we lived in Volšovy, that’s a little village near Sušice. And then I found out that... I got a letter from some man, a young man came up and asked: ‘Hana Šlaufová?’ ‘Yes.’ Well, so I got a letter from... [the man that] I’d fallen in love [with] in Prague, that he’s gone. And now this man said he’d guide me across [the border]. He had one other young lady that he’d already agreed to guide across. He said: ‘Come to Prague, and we’ll discuss it.’ But he was a stranger, I’d never seen him before, who was he? So I reckoned: ‘I don’t yet know if I’ll go. But if I did go, I’d go alone.’ That moment, when he gave me that letter, that changed my life.”

  • “In Germany, I couldn’t stand not having anything, not having money, so I did what I could. People were hungry in the camp in Germany. It was after World War II, there wasn’t a single... in Munich, where we were, it was... there wasn’t a single house left standing. It was in ruins. We went from Munich to Ulm. In Ulm they split us up, the students - as in, academics - went to Ludwigsburg. I taught English there in Ludwigsburg. It was a college, which... Masaryk College, where the pupils who’d left from here without finishing secondary school, they could finish it there. Well, but those were villages and towns, and there were still machines lying around the meadows, broken tanks, planes, military cars were strewn around there years after the war. So I’d dig the cables out of them, I burnt the insulation off the wires in a little fire, and I sold the copper I got from it. Or I don’t know, I always found some money, so I bought myself some things even there, to keep myself warm...”

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Plzeň, dům Hany Gerzanicové, 10.03.2014

    (audio)
    duration: 03:00:55
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Plzeň-Roudná, 27.03.2014

    (audio)
    duration: 01:15:13
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

Omnia vincit amor

Hana in 1947
Hana in 1947

Poet and translator, Hana Gerzanicová, real name Hana Gerzanic-Hons, was born on May 11, 1928 in Pilsen. She comes from a teacher’s family, which provided her with good language training. After grammar school she studied at the School of Liberal Arts at Charles University in Prague, but she soon (1950) emigrated via West Germany to Australia with her future husband, for which deed she was sentenced to seventeen years of prison in absentia. In Australia she did manual jobs working at a conveyor belt and washing floors in hospitals until 1952. She later found employment as an office worker, she taught languages in private, became a teacher - part-time at first, then full-time - and later the deputy headmistress of a school. She earned a degree in theology and worked as a religious coordinator. All the while she wrote and did translations for the local Czech radio station and was active in the Czech community. She moved back to the Czech Republic in 1999. She has received a number of domestic and international awards both for her literary accomplishments and for spreading the good name of her country. She is also a benefactor of her region. Hana Gerzanicová died on September 25th, 2023.