“They banged on the door. It was around eleven at night. They picked up my sister from the district jail in Ostrava and she had to go and take them to us. She went with them almost all the way to the cottage where we lived. When they approached the cottage, one of the Gestapo men took them back to the road and pulled them over behind a brush by the road, and they were waiting for my husband to come. They banged on the door. We were two tenants there. They came into the kitchen. We slept in the kitchen and brother slept in the room. We had a little baby boy, and so I woke up immediately. Of course I knew they came for my husband. They began yelling: ´What’s your name?´ They were yelling at him, and he was in shock and didn’t respond. I said several times: ´His name is Špaček.´ They were shouting at him until he said it himself. He had to put his clothes on. I began to dress as well and they told me: ´You don’t.´ When my husband said that his working clothes were hanging in the hallway, they began beating him until he rolled on the floor. He wanted to take a drink. I held a cup of milk at his lips so that he could drink a little bit. Then they led him away as a dog on a chain.”
“When the Gestapo came for my two sisters, my brother was sitting on the hill and looking at what was going on at home. My mom ran to the forest and she didn’t stop until she reached Myslík and she didn’t return home anymore, only after the war. The first year she lived alone in the forest until winter. She was living on fruit she was taking from gardens, and then she came to Mrs. Žídková. She was the grandmother of Jirka Chlébek, who is still my friend. When we lived in the village, we lived close to them, and we knew each other. Mom always used to say: ´As I was sitting on the shepher’s pasture,´ that means on the hill behind the village, ´snow began falling.´ She had been in the forest until that time. She thought that she would now have to go and turn herself in, because she was no longer able to stay outside. But she remembered Agneša. She went to her and Agneša told her: ´Where’d you go? Stay here.´ And so mom stayed with her. She was there until the end of winter. I had a cow on a rented plot of land, and I was bringing flour for her there. You know, she had no food stamps, and so we supported her.”
“During the time of the crisis, we would come home from school and there would not be much time left for studying. We had to take cows to the pasture, and whoever was at home, had to go pick blueberries in the valley. We would then go from Hůrky – I myself – all the way to Brušperk or to Příbor to sell the blueberries. It cost there a bit more than in Místek. It was almost a three-hour walk to Příbor. When we were going to sell in Brušperk, we were then allowed to buy cloth for a dress or an apron, for instance, for the money we earned.”
Jindřiška Janíková, née Kulová, was born in 1922 in Palkovice. Her father joined the resistance movement during the war, and he was hiding communist resistance fighter Ludvík Korbáš in the settlement Palkovické Hůrky. After their activity was discovered, her father and her two sisters and husband were arrested in 1943. Her mother managed to escape and she was hiding from the Gestapo until the end of the war, at first in the surrounding forests and then in the cottage of Anežka Žídková. While the sisters were released from prison after several months, their father was sentenced to death and executed on June 15, 1944. Her husband died as a result of the suffering in February 1944 in prison in Bayreuth. For the last two years of the war, Jindřiška Janíková thus had to take care not only of the entire farm, but also of her young baby son. As a wife of a resistance fighter she was not entitled to receiving food stamps. She joined the Communist Party immediately after the war, and she has remained a staunch communist all her life. After 1948 she began working as a clerk in the district action committee and later she worked in the local administration office in Palkovice. She still lives in Palkovice.
Monument to the dead, executed and tortured to death during WWII in Palkovice, including the names of her father František Kula and her husband Stanislav Špaček
Monument to the dead, executed and tortured to death during WWII in Palkovice, including the names of her father František Kula and her husband Stanislav Špaček
Monument to the dead, executed and tortured to death during WWII in Palkovice, including the names of her father František Kula and her husband Stanislav Špaček
Monument to the dead, executed and tortured to death during WWII in Palkovice, including the names of her father František Kula and her husband Stanislav Špaček
