Jarmila Rubeyová

* 1930

  • "All the young ones from the hills came to our house for the New Year's eve. There was about eighteen or twenty people and they wanted to go to Prženské paseky to a New Year's party, where they had music despite the ban. There was a guy with one leg who played an accordion and then there was one family at Prženské paseky with five boys all of which played an instrument. So they used to play there as well. I was not allowed to go but sometime they would take me with them, for example during the afternoon. So we went there in the afternoon and suddenly seven partisan fighters came, they were armed, belts with bullet shells all over them and they had a machine gun on a tripod. They put the machine gun in front of the door and told us that nobody was allowed to leave the house. They said: 'And if anybody squealed at home that the partisans were here, we'll burn their houses down.' They sent three boys to the pub for a bottle of vodka or some alcohol. I guess they had already made an agreement with the innkeeper before. When the boys came back they allowed us to go to the ball. But they came there as well. We found out later that the partisans were outside and observed. And then we came back safe."

  • "We were at home and we saw already from a great distance that some men were coming. At first two of them came armed and said: 'Mama, kill a rooster, you have to give us something to eat.' My mother saw they were armed so she went and did as they said and they ate and went away. And since then they started coming to us, sometimes up to seven or eight of them. We had a full keg of cabbage and they ate almost all of it. They came in the night and said: 'Mama, give us some cabbage.' So my mum gave them the cabbage and bread. When they started coming regularly we started looking for food. My mother was looking. There wasn't much to get for the food stamps so she went to Rajnochovice where she was born and she asked the miller to give her some flour. Then we were always baking bread at home. And it went as far that I was bringing them the bread to a bunker they had in the woods under the Ojičná hill. They gave me two loafs of bread to carry and I went. They waited for me somewhere on the way and I gave it to them. Before that they ensured my father that nobody would do me any harm. That even if thirty men had been sleeping at our house and us girls among them, nothing would happen to us. That they swore an oath and any partisan would have immediately been punished. But our father was still worried about us. He would rather have gone there himself."

  • "We went in groups. Sometimes we would go to Lázy, that took more than an hour. We went in a group of fifteen, twenty... we didn't go alone. And we also used to go to Mikulůvka. Then we had to cross the woods. We had boots on and took our dancing shoes in the hand and when we came there, we let the boots under a tree, put the nice shoes on and went on."

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    Vítkov, 23.10.2012

    (audio)
    duration: 02:21:43
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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Up in the hills the people held together

Jarmila Rubeyová (Vaculová)
Jarmila Rubeyová (Vaculová)
photo: archiv pamětníka

Jarmila Rubeyová, nee Vaculová, was born in 1930 in the Požařiska colony, a part of the Kateřinice municipality in the Vsetín district in Moravia. From 1944 her family supported the partisan unit lead by Petr Buďko from the Jan Žižka 1st Czechoslovak Partisan Brigade. Jarmila and her father sometimes also served as messengers exposing the whole family to a great risk since some of the houses in the area were burned down and people arrested and executed for supporting the partisan fighters. After the war her parents stayed in the colony. Since 1960, after the departure of her mother, the colony remains without any permanent residents. Jarmila Rubeyová moved to Vítkov where she lives with her husband till today.