“They had a lot of stuff, whether their own or stolen from others, I don’t know. And then, in order to get rid of it, she gave me some clothes to wear. This girl a bit older than me said she didn’t want it anymore, they couldn’t carry it with them. And so she left me some clothes. I didn’t want to accept it, but she brought it anyway, for me to keep. We became kind of friends, they stayed over a few times.”
“We lived in the bottom end of the village and the school was at the top end. The old building is long gone, now there’s a new one in the same place. And there was this German girl who voluntarily joined me on the way to school. There were some German kids – just a couple – who shouted ‘Czech swine!’ in my way. They called me names, that’s how it was. She walked with me and begged me not to hold it against them. She invited me round to their place. The first grade wasn’t so bad.”
“This was in 1916, they were building a mill down where the MEZ (Moravian Electrotechnical Works) used to be, and they needed helpers. So, my mother, when she had breastfed her kids, used to go down and help clean up after grinding. She did what she was told, collected her wages, and rushed back home to her kids. She made some soup for them, and back she went. And this is how it went until they grew up. This was before the war. Everyone did what they could. They had to. She told me she used to cry when she had to lock the bread away in this wooden chest so that the kids couldn’t have a slice while she was out.”
Alžběta Ohlídalová, nee Šlesingerová, was born on August 7, 1933, in Červená Voda, then called Mährisch Rothwasser, into a poor family. Her father Jan Šlesinger (1884-1967) worked as a farm hand and her mother Matylda (1892-1977) also had a job, while also raising her seven children. Apart from Alžběta, who was born last, she also had Jan in 1910, Robert in 1911, Rudolf and Růžena in 1916, Josef in 1920 and Karel in 1922. The Šlesingers were Czech. They were living in the retirement cottage of a farmstead owned by the Kobzas, a German farming family, to whom they often lent a helping hand with various farm jobs. In 1939, Alžběta started attending a German school, where she went until the end of the war. She found the cohabitation of Czechs and Germans in her town peaceful and trouble-free. Most of her classmates were German. One of them even defended her when some other German classmates bullied her. She was sad to see her German neighbours go following the forced expulsion after the war. In 1948, on finishing the primary school, she got a job at the Perla textile factory and did not leave until her retirement in 1987. In 1952, she married Adolf Ohlídal (1930-1991), and they had three children, born in 1952, 1954, and 1957. Despite the lifelong hard labour in the textile factory, she found her job meaningful. In 2021, she was living at Červená Voda nursing home.
