“There were large operational facilities in Dachau, workshops where uniforms and clothing for prisoners were sewn. It was complete production, from weaving, cutting and packing the clothes into bundles. These were then sent to seamstresses or stitchers. Younger women were chosen for this work. My mom told me: ´If you go there, mind that you don’t work with sewing machines. You know that you cannot work with sewing machines at all, you’d only stitch your fingers to the cloth.´ This was good advice, for one really had to be able to do everything to work there. They sat me in front of a sewing machine and that was it. On top of that, it was a special machine, with distilled water in a small tube, and this was heated by electricity. As you sewed, the seam was ironed at the same time, and perfectly, as you’d never be able to do it with a regular iron.”
“When we came back after the war, we wanted to return to Lidice, but the relatives were telling us: ´Wait one week, there will be a commemoration ceremony, and all of you who have returned will go together.´ Not all of us were there yet, but from mid-May the women who had been interned were returning. We were to meet in the chateau in Buštěhrad and from there go to Lidice for that memorial service. We came to the village, and from the hill we could see – an empty valley...only the grave was marked. There was already a makeshift cross. A man from Hřebeč had allegedly been taking care of the place. And, there were rumours that there was a sown field which was kept by the State farm in Buštěhrad. When they arrived to that place with horses, the horses refused to cross the place where the grave was. It’s unbelievable, but people from that farm were saying that they couldn’t make the horses go there.”
“There was a woman who lived in a house very close to the student dorm, (she might have been a caretaker), and whenever she spotted a young man who looked like a student coming down from Charles Square, she would run out and tell him what had happened there during the night. We saw several of them turn around and go away. They spent the night in another place or they arrived from somewhere else. Simply, they didn’t spend the night in the dorm. She had warned them."
“One of the prisoners from Sachsenhausen wrote me a letter, asking me to visit him. He was now working in the Central Committee of the Communist Party. At that time, it was next to the Powder Tower, which they seized from a bank. It was already prepared, the communists were already active in the group of prisoners from Sachsenhausen; they held meetings, they knew where they would be placed for work, and all this. And one of these men wrote to me, asking me to see him, and he offered me a job. I told him: ´But I’m not a communist, and my parents were not in the party, either. I know that my father was voting for the social democrats, so how could I work in the Central Committee?´ He replied that this would be taken care of. ´Here, you could have benefits like nowhere else. And if necessary, you would stand by the machine-gun in the window and shoot at people.´ I was appalled and said: ´But I’m already employed and my co-workers in the insurance company were always treating me well during the war, I’m happy working there, I’d have to think about it.´ Well, I decided not to take it. This was in 1945, in early autumn.”
“My sister and I were normally sleeping – and suddenly Dad heard some steps, as people kept walking down from the hill. Ferda Pospíšil lived there as well, he was an invalid from WWI and had a wooden leg. When he walked, it made a clapping sound. I was still sleeping, and I only remember it as my parents told me about it later, but i do remember Dad saying to my Mom: ´What’s going on there? They must be taking Ferda somewhere, I heard the clapping of his leg, what’s happening?´ And after three o’clock in the morning, they came to our house as well...”
Miloslava Kalibová was born December 29, 1922 as the elder of two daughters. Her father, Jaroslav Suchánek, was a cook, and between the wars worked in Luhačovice and later in Nový Smokovec. Her mother, Anna, came from Lidice. The Suchánek family therefore had a house built there at the beginning of the war. Between 1933-1941 Miloslava Kalibová attended a girls’ grammar school in Prague and in 1941 she began working. In the early morning of June 10, 1942 the Gestapo ordered the family to leave the house. Their father was executed together with the men of Lidice, and both sisters and the mother met the same fate as other women from Lidice. After a three-day internment in the grammar school in Kladno, they were transported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Miloslava Kalibová stayed there until the end of the war. Her ordeal culminated on April 28, 1945 in a death march, which lasted five days and covered 150 kilometres. A group of Czech women reached the liberated territory, and from there, it was several kilometres to the assembly camp for foreigners in Schwerin where Miroslava Kalibová stayed until her return home. She arrived in Czechoslovakia on June 2, 1945. Immediately, on June 8, she returned to her former job in a health insurance company for the self-employed. After organizational changes in 1948 and 1952, she joined the Ministry of Health where she continued working for another 30 years. She also married in 1952. She was never a member of any political party. She did serve as a chairwoman of the basic chapter of the Czech Association of Freedom Fighters in Lidice.
