They saved her life and welcomed her into the family
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Marie Kacrová was born on 7 August 1938 as the older of two children to her parents Antonín and Evženie Bohatý in the village of Libánovka in Volhynia, in former Poland (now Ukraine). Both of her parents were Volhynian Czechs. The family lived on a farm with twenty hectares of fields together with the grandparents of the witness, Anna and Vincenc Bohatý. During the Second World War, the grandparents sheltered a Jewish girl, Mindla Švarcová. They thus saved her life, because except for one sister, her entire family was murdered by the Nazis. In March 1944, her father enlisted in the Czechoslovak Army Corps. He suffered a gunshot wound in the battles for the Dukla Pass. After a three-month treatment, he endured harsh fighting across Slovakia and Moravia. After demobilisation, he returned to Libánovka, where he was almost beaten to death by the Banderites. After the war, the family changed the name of Mindla Švarcová to Emílie Bohatá at the authorities’ office, and then they all re-emigrated to Czechoslovakia in 1947. Emílie and Anna Bohatá settled in Strachotín in South Moravia. In 1952, Anna Bohatá died, and all her descendants and legal heirs renounced her property in favour of Emílie. Marie settled with her parents on a farm in Úsov. Shortly afterwards, her five-year-old brother Vítězslav died on the operation table of the Olomouc hospital. During collectivisation, her father was threatened with imprisonment, so he joined the Unified Agricultural Cooperative (JZD) out of fear for the fate of his family. Marie could then only study agriculture. She, therefore, entered an agricultural school in the remote Horní Heřmanice. However, she did not finish it because her mother became severely ill, and her father was not able to take care of the household. Therefore, she returned to Úsov, where she worked as a farm worker in JZD and later in Mez Mohelnice. In 1957, she married Karel Kacr, with whom she moved to the neighbouring village of Klopina after the reconstruction of the house, where their three children - Karel, Antonín and Jana - were born. Marie Kacrová remained in close touch with Emílie (Mindla). She always considered her as her only sister. In 2015, as the last eyewitness, she received the Righteous Among the Nations diploma awarded in memoriam to Anna and Vincenc Bohatý at the Israeli Embassy. At the time of the filming in 2023, she lived in Klopina.
