Věra Kyjovská

* 1934

  • "Actually, the youngest brother, a certain lady betrayed him, and they came for him. I was with my grandmother in Jinonice. But he was already at work because he worked in Škoda factory. So when he wasn't home, they wanted to know where he was, so Grandma told them where. But then they came to the Škoda company. Well, they just picked him up and took him away. He was first in Petschk's palace, there he spent a month, and after a month he was taken to Mauthausen and he did not return from there, he was nineteen years old."

  • "And when it started, my grandmother let me go. Nothing was known there, but when I was gone, they knew it now, but there were no cell phones, nothing like that. So you know, she was afraid of what had happened to me. And I was at home too, now I saw that they wore tricolors, as they say. Well, there was a lot of talk there, I didn't understand much. But I still arrived and waited back for the tram, but it didn't work anymore, so I would walk. However, it was quite far away and I had to go there in one apartment, it was the Women's Home, instead of the Women's Home there were just soldiers. I couldn't go anywhere else before I had to cross. It just so happened to me before I started like this... when we got out, they were soldiers running like this and shooting, so we hid as much as we could."

  • "Then it was all over, so uncle, Dad's brother, still insisted we should go somewhere else. Dad didn't want to, and he didn't want to go in until they decided to go. So we were here and we were in Filipov. And I still went to school there, because in Filip's school it was only until the fifth grade and I already had to go to Jiříkov, there was more. I always had to have nine years old, because I wasn't nine years, so even then I actually went to that one-year training course."

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    Krásná Lípa, 19.12.2019

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    duration: 56:00
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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When he was arrested, I refused to learn German

Young Věra Kyjovská
Young Věra Kyjovská
photo: archiv pamětnice

Věra Kyjovská, née Reitmajerová, was born on March 20, 1934 in Prague. During the war, her uncle Jaroslav Reitmajer was arrested for publicly criticizing the Nazis and someone betraying him. He was imprisoned in Petschk’s palace and in Mauthausen, where he died at the age of 19. Věra experienced the Prague Uprising in the streets, as a ten-year-old girl she experienced fighting in the streets. After the war with her parents, she went to the border with the village of Filipov in the Šluknov foothills. She became a nurse, worked for the Red Cross and later worked as an office secretary.