Růžena Pavlíková

* 1940

  • “Then we found out that we didn't have to leave after all. My aunt took care of most of these things. As uncle was a good man, but he couldn't arrange anything. Later we found out that as my aunt had this elderly mother we didn't have to go anywhere if he would go to local authorities. He carried her from the train, then they came for us with a horse-cart, and as we went it was raining. She died in two days.” - “They just told you that you will be deported to Germany?” - “I remember that. I have those two wooden suitcases at home. As we went to Nejdek where we were supposed to get on a train. We took just some essential stuff. Clothes and so on. It was supposed to the last deportation. Then, all of a sudden, they told us we weren't going. So we went back. And we left everything there. As after some time, we had to move away.”

  • “So I went to Jáchymov. I was 15 years old. There were Russians in Jáchymov, they got flats there where they were living with their wives and children. So I used to take care of Nataša the entire day, till her mother came home. I was 15 years old, I was still just a child. In retrospect, I found it quite daring to leave this baby girl with just a fifteen-year-old. She was maybe a year and a half old. The parents were working in the pit. After that, as a 16-years-old, I went to the pit myself, to work in the kitchen. To the Eliáš mine. I also did night shifts. As we had to prepare stuff for the following day, like vegetables and such. I was quite afraid. As there were convicts up there. They were all locked up, but after a year, I had to quit anyway. I wanted to work in the pit. But I had to be eighteen years old. But they would take me anyway. So I had been working behind this counter. As they went down the pit – there were also civilians – they were issued those tags. Both civilians and convicts.”

  • “We went by train to the Rakovník region. And we had to change. And they took us from where we got off the train, there were horses waiting for us, just this long hay wagon. The year was 1946. We were accommodated in Zhoř. But furniture – we didn't have much. But everyone living at the farm could get this shed, where he could keep chickens or a pig. The countryside was nice, but we weren't cooking much and so. My uncle was given horses and he had been working from dawn to dusk, my aunt had to tend the pigs. My sister had to help her. That was a difficult job. And my aunt already suffered from pains. There weren't many families at the farm. It wasn't big. Just this U-shaped farm with basic utilities.”

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    Karlovy Vary, 20.07.2018

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I am sorry that I haven’t been asking about the past more

Růžena Pavlíková, a portrait
Růžena Pavlíková, a portrait
photo: pamětnice

Růžena Pavlíková, née Kolitschová, was born on February 26th 1940 in the town of Abertamy in the Sudeten part of the Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary) region. Růžena’s birth was accompanied by a tragic event: her mother, Anna, née Löffler, died during childbirth, and her father, Moritz Kolitsch, who did a blue-collar job in the leather processing industry, was serving in Wehrmacht at that time. Růžena and her four years older sister Helga were taken in by Aloisie and Antonín Habrecht from Albertamy, a childless pair who ware also in the glove-making business. Even before that, they had adopted Emma, a German girl twelve years older than Růžena. Her father settled in Germany after the war and didn’t claim responsibility for his daughters. In 1946, Mrs and Mr Habrecht and their adopted daughters had been included in the last wave of deportations to Germany and spent several days in the detention camp in Nejdek. However, the deportation didn’t take place in the end and the family had returned to Abertamy. But after several weeks, they were forced to leave their home – with two suitcases, they moved inland, to a farm in Zhoř near Rakovník. There they were given a single room to live in. Shortly after their arrival, Aloisa’s infirm mother had died, exhausted by being forced to leave her home. In 1947, Růžena started elementary school in Krakovec near Zhoř and began to learn Czech. In 1951, her foster mother, Aloisie, had developed cancer. Emma, the oldest of her foster children, managed to get her treatment in a hospital in Karlovy Vary and arranged for the girls to move to Jáchymov where she lived with her husband. A year later, Aloisie died in Jáchymov. Růžena had to work since the age of 15. She started as a nanny in a Russian family in Jáchymov, then, at the age of sixteen, she was working as a kitchen helper, and as a 17 years old, she started working in the mines, issuing tags and lamps to miners. In 1958, she met her future husband, Jiří Pavlík, at her workplace in the Jáchymov mines, whom she married in 1960. Together, they raised two sons. After that, Růžena had been working as a phone operator at Tosta textile factory for 12 years and for the next 17 years she was a receptionist at a spa resort where she made use of her knowledge of German. She met her father for the first time in 1970, at the age of thirty. She has been living in Ostrov nad Ohří with her husband.