Jarmila Hermanová

* 1930

  • "When the grain was handed in or it was set how much beet must be sown, there was foot-and-mouth disease in Želivec at that time. We used to ride in the field with the cows. We sowed the beets, my mother and I made the rows by hand, we sowed it by hand and we used shovels to flatten it up. Such a sly guy came saying that we had not comply with the seeding area. I said, 'He only finished the fourth grade at school and he's going to play smart.´ We had to fill at least the amount we were supposed to hand in, and we did. I remember that we used to cut pieces off the beet with a knife so that they wouldn't get too small, so that we could fulfill it."

  • "When the German threw me out on the road, I went home, what could I do. Mrs. Brabec was standing there and said to me, 'Go home and don't look for him. Our boys all ran off into the woods to hide somewhere, he went with them.''I accepted it and went home. But I stopped at the Kroupa mill. The boy came to the door and was crying and said to me: 'Jarka, please go home and don't look for him. I'm going to leave the mill, I'm not going to be here and I'm going home too.'When he told me to go and he went as well, I went home. I got to the memorial, there's a World War I memorial there, and even when I was going past it before, I saw somebody lying there, but I didn't think it could be my dad. It wasn't until I was coming back now that I saw him lying on the ground on his back with his cap in his hand. And I recognized my Dad by the cap lying on his chest."

  • "The Germans interrogated Dad at the Gründl family from Sunday afternoon until nine o'clock in the evening, so that he would reveal the other fourteen people who had been at the disarmament. Dad was standing like an oak tree and did not say anything. Mr Gründl then said to me: ‚I will tell people who Franta Šimek was!' I said: ‚Mr Gründl, who values life knows it, and who doesn't, doesn't care.' If you knew what they did to him, but he didn't say, he didn't say anything. They tortured him in every way to make him say who else was there, and he claimed he didn't know, he didn't know them. At nine o'clock they took him to the place where the memorial is today. There is a little pond in Želivec, and from the pond a little stream flows out into the Štířín pond, there is a little bridge there. They put him on the meadow, which is a little lower than the road, and eight murderers shot him, eight Germans executed him."

  • Full recordings
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    Praha, 19.01.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:02:59
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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I dreamed every night for a year about my dad with a bullet in his head

Jarmila Hermanová at the age of fourteen
Jarmila Hermanová at the age of fourteen
photo: Witness´s archive

Jarmila Hermanová was born on 3 June 1930 in Želivec, now part of the municipality of Sulice in the Prague-East district. Her father František Šimek worked at the train post office, her mother Marie Šimková took care of a small farm and two daughters. She remembered her father’s disappointment after the abolished mobilisation in September 1938. In March 1939 she saw German soldiers arriving to occupy Czechoslovakia. Her dad was involved in the underground movement, but the family did not know about it. He disarmed the German soldiers on 5 May 1945 in Želivec. The Germans detained and brutally interrogated him. He did not reveal the names of the other participants in the disarmament and the Germans shot him on 6 May. The witness searched for her father at the SS headquarters and discovered his body lying at the memorial to the victims of the First World War on 7 May. She took over her dad´s work on the farm, as private farmers they had to fill supplies and grow required crops after collectivisation. Mum joined a cooperative farm in 1952. The witness had two daughters and in 2023 was living with her husband in Želivec.