Anna Lišková

* 1929

  • “There was a four-way highway, where we used to collect, whatever Americans threw away. My brother with my aunt Mosler collected cigarette butts. Sometimes there were even halves. My brother was fourteen and smoking. My aunt taught him. Then they rolled tobacco in their own papers and smoked it. Once Americans stopped under the bridge and we were looking at them from above. They called us to come closer. I had an apron around me, so they gave me cans, coffee and teas. With my arms full of stock I went through the woods up to the hills to the farmers´ we stayed with. Mummy was really pleased. Later, when we were coming back from Unrra we got a five kilogram packs of stock for each person.“

  • “Already at an advanced age my father apprenticed a bricklayer and joined the organisation Todt. He was no soldier; he was in charge of a few men and always building something quick for the soldiers. Then they were in Poland, as the Russians were chasing Germans away. The Germans were banned to come out in Čenstochová at night but my father could not help himself. Then his comrades were talking about it, when my mum went there to fetch his stuff and suitcase and in two weeks gave birth to my youngest sister Isolda. Despite the ban my father went to get Polish workers for the construction works to get it finished. And a certain Polish guy stabbed him with a kitchen knife. His intestines were also wounded and the patrol found him at the road ditch in the morning. They took him to the hospital immediately. He survived an operation and they asked him to write back home. He said he would do that on his own, as soon as he feels better. But then he got blood poisoning caused by that dirty knife.”

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    Kobylá nad Vidnavkou, 19.04.2017

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The father was killed by a member of the Polish underground resistance

Anna Lišková (Ringová)
Anna Lišková (Ringová)
photo: archiv pamětnice

Anna Lišková, née Ringová, was born on 18th July, 1929 in the village of Wehowitz (nowadays a Polish village of Wiechowice, in 1936 - 1945 called Wehen). Her father of was German and her mother of the Czech nationality. Witness´ native village was located in the Prussian part of Silesia right at the Czechoslovak borders. To make living for the family the father apprenticed a bricklayer during WW2 in 1941 at the age of thirty-eight and joined the organisation Todt. As a leader of a small group of workers he worked in Hamburg, Lübeck, Hannover and also Crimea. From there he was transferred to Čenstochová (Polish Częstochowa) in the former General gouvernement. There he stayed also in the summer 1944, when in the framework of the even Storm an all-national Polish upraise against German occupation broke out, the most important act of which became the Warsaw Uprising. The resistance was very strong also in Čenstochová. And right on 30th August, 1944 the father lost his life due to a stab wound in his belly probably caused by a member of the Polish resistance. The mother, who was in the advanced stage of pregnancy, went to have her husband buried in Čenstochová. Yet she only saw his body in a mass grave. Only a week later her youngest daughter Isolda was born. Allegedly already in October 1944 the family got evacuated and they spent a year and a half in a small village of Frasdorf in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. Within repatriation the family went back to Czechoslovakia in May 1946. They settled down in Vlčice in Jesenicko region. In 1953 the witness married Josef Liška and moved to his farm in Kobylé nad Vidnavkou. The husband was a private farmer, but back then the communist regime was managing an all-republic collectivisation, so he was constantly forced to join the united agricultural cooperative. He managed to resist for many years, but he had to pay back way too high ratios of agricultural commodities and Anna Lišková remembers that often basic food was lacking at home. Finally the husband had to join the state agricultural cooperative Žulová in 1961, and the witness also got a job there. Following unpleasant peripetios she could leave two years later to the factory producing shopping bags called Gala, a national company in the nearby Hukovice, where she remained until retirement. In 2017 still lived in Kobylé nad Vidnavkou.