Anna Schreiberová

* 1928

  • „According to what people said the guerrillas came to a pub and just killed three policemen. There was a whole pub full of people and everyone saw that. They simply came in without any notice or explanation, came in and began shooting, each of them took one officer. My friend and I were coming back from needlework. In winter my mum sent me to learn sewing. We came out of the house and did not know what happened. It was all in the area of Vranová. The village was split into Lhota and Vranová. We went from Vranová to Lhota. It was just a few steps from the village. We went along the street and bumped into the shooting guerrilla. Why did they take the road? Because they flew to Lhota to the police station, where they wanted to tie up all the Czech officers not to call the news further on and they had a chance to run away. So all they wanted was not to say anything, but we did not know anything yet. Our friend took us into the house, because she figured that it may be serious. And then we learnt the truth. In a moment a man came to the house and told everyone what happened in the pub. So we understood who they actually were pointing a revolver to us.“

  • „They had their car in our congregation gatehousel. They went to go out, although we all crowded the courtyard and they could not leave. We were such silly children as we did not understand that the police has to be obeyed. We kept saying that we like her and will not give her up. And they could say whatever they wanted and they were about seventy. And they did not take us by violence, they would not throw us away one by one. When it took too long, so the sister from the general council and said: ,Sisters, you have to be reasonable and listen to police. There is nothing we can do. They will take the general superior but we can say goodbye.‘ So they have to come with us into the choir to say goodbye.“

  • „We learnt that the nuns were attacked in a house and taken to a cottage. There they were violently dress to civil clothes and sent to their native villages. Then they could not come back anymore. There were many educated nuns amongst us and we knew they wrote a request to the president and around six institutions to pledge for protection for us, who work laboriously in factories. So it was all over. They probably did it wrong. It was likely to be done altogether. The church secretary was then called off and nothing alike has ever happened to us.“

  • „I think two came to us. I was just cleaning my brothers´ Sunday clothes. They came saying all men have to go with them. So I left my work immediately and put them some bread into their pockets as I did not know where they´re going. Daddy hid in a forge. An officer saw his and said to my mummy: ,If your husband does not come right here, we´ll shoot into the house.‘ When the officer left around the corner, mum begged daddy to come out, that they´d shoot his children. Poor dad was scared to death, but did eventually go to the square. There were at least five hundred men, as they took anyone from thirteen years and lined them up for the machine guns. Daddy had his house with two floors and upstairs in one of the flats lived a teacher, whose husband went too. Next to us lived an aunt, whose husband shot himself when Hitler marched into Olomouc. He was an officer and could not stand the shame of being occupied by Hitler. My aunt´s seventeen years old son (Jan Jirauch), who studied in Brno, but got an acute rheumatism so had to lie in bed at home. An officer said that unless he stands up, he shoots him in bed. So he did and was shot in the garden.“

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    Město Albrechtice, 31.10.2015

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Thank you for praying for me

Anna Schreiber in the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy of St. Charles Borromeo. Photographed in Trutnov, where the witness worked in a factory Texlen.
Anna Schreiber in the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy of St. Charles Borromeo. Photographed in Trutnov, where the witness worked in a factory Texlen.
photo: archiv pamětnice

Sister Petrina Anna Schreiberová was born on 15 April, 1928 in Vranová Lhota as the third child of five of Josef and Anna Schreiber. A day before the end of war the Germans almost shot her father and two brothers together with all men from the native village. They survived, but three innocent men lost their life for a death of a single German soldier, amongst which was also Jan Jirauch, a cousin of the witness. Later Anna Schreiberová decided to sacrifice her life to god and in 1949 joined a religious Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy of St. Charles Borromeo. Back then there was a communist regime in the country, so sister Petrina witnessed many imprisonments of the congregation sisters. In 1952 they deported her together with others to Trutnovsko region, where they had to spend several years to work as manual workers in Texlenu Trutnov. In 1956 Texlen Trutnov ceased the job relations with the religious. As a certificated nurse the witness got the rest home in Prachatice, a part of Czech catholic charity. She worked there for long seventeen years. Under the congregation she then worked in the rest home in Frýdek-Místek and until September 1990 in the Social care institution in Jiříkov. Today she lives in charity house of the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy of St. Charles Borromeo in the town of Albrechtice.