Libuše Klimšová

* 1934

  • "I knew it well. When they reported how far away it was from Ostrava, it was unbearable and they would let us go home. I would run home from school. I was so scared, even though I had heard planes before. As a child, I could distinguished bomber planes form other planes. They made these heavy sounds, if you know what I mean. As a child I could tell whether it was a fighter aircraft or a heavy bomber filled with bombs.”

  • "It was good to wear sunglasses in the summer because the ash would fall in our eyes. There were mines at Zárubek. Carts would transport coal above the houses in which people lived. So the coal dust would cover Ostrava when the wind would blow. It wasn't like it is now. But it wasn't that bad and it could be endured. I used to work on Stodolní, today a famous street, and I didn't consider it at all dirty or anything like that. I grew up in that environment. It was just dusty because they were mining using an old method. So when the wind blew, we’d get everything in our eyes.”

  • "It was very anti-German. I was eleven years old then. The people took this man, who worked in a pulp mill and was a German Jew, and they put him on a cart and pushed him all around Vratimov. Whoever had the chance would throw something at him. It was more of an execution than a trial. Why didn't they report him for sending people to concentration camps so that he could be properly sentenced? I know I had debates with my dad about it. He said it was fine as it was. I thought it was unfair. I had long debates with my father, first these kinds and then political ones. Because he went crazy and joined the Communist Party."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Ostrava, 11.01.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:01:07
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Ostrava, 16.01.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 56:31
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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After the war, instead of being nice to each other, people did awful things

Libuše Klimšová, portrait, around 1950
Libuše Klimšová, portrait, around 1950
photo: archiv pamětníka

Libuše Klimšová, née Janalíková, was born on July 6, 1934 in Vratimov near Ostrava. Her father Vladislav Janalík owned a small cabinet making business. The communist regime confiscated it from him as part of the nationalization process and Libuše was labeled as the daughter of a capitalist, because of which she later had trouble getting into secondary school. At the age of eighteen, she married the son of the owner of the well-known and prosperous bakery Procházka z Hrabové. The Procházka family had also lost their business as part of the nationalization process in the 1950s. Libuše worked as a clerk in the Ostrava production cooperative Dyhor and then in the company Vítkovické Stavby Ostrava. She led a quiet family life, raised three daughters and tried not to show her disapproval of the communist regime. Nevertheless, in the 1970s, the State Security started to notice her as her eldest daughter emigrated and settled in Switzerland with her husband and two small children. Because of this, Libuše was monitored and interrogated by the State Security. At work, she was transferred to a lower paying position. Her husband died of cancer. In her fifties she remarried. She saw her daughter and grandchildren in Switzerland only after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. In 2023, she lived in Ostrava.