Anna Šrotýřová

* 1920

  • “I had agreed with my husband beforehand that he would be waiting for us at the border. I was waiting for the end of the school year of my older daughter. They had some exhibition in school, and they received their annual grade report. We dressed up in the morning and went to see the exhibition, she received her report, she had straight A’s. Then I told her that we would go mushroom picking. I packed a fairy tale book and a doll into a bag, and I gave the girls sandals to change into, because they had rubber boots, and we went to the forest. It was about ten kilometres to the state border. The man who was to accompany us was not coming. The girls already wanted to go back. They argued that there were no mushrooms, and that I wasn’t looking for them anyway... I made up a story, promising them that we would have a nice little house there, looking as if it were made from gingerbread... I eventually managed to drag my tired girls there. We came to a strip of land, and I said: ´Now, children, we’re going to Germany.´ The girls began whining: ´We don’t want to go to Germany, we want to go to grandma!´ I grabbed their hands and we ran over that strip. I sat them down on a big fallen tree trunk and told them: ´Wait here, I’ll go and see where daddy is.´ They kept crying, but through the trees I could already see him coming. As soon as dad came, the crying stopped and all was well. He arrived there in a jeep. American soldiers drove him there. We got into the car, they covered us with a tarpaulin so that nobody would see us, and through Finsterau they drove us to Zwiesel.”

  • “My daughters had been here before. At that time everybody had to register in Prachatice. Zlatuška then told me that the official had told her that dad ought not to come here. Allegedly, there were also cases when somebody arrived here, but at the airport something struck him as suspicious, and so he returned to the plane and flew back. The people were still afraid. We went here in 1990, one year after the Velvet revolution. But my husband told me: ´When I was handing them the American passport, my hand was shaking.´”

  • “They had agreed that more of them would go. My husband left quickly at night when he was on duty. We had agreed on a place where he would be waiting if something happened. I packed a few things in his rucksack for him, and I left early in the morning through the back door. Later I learnt that they had watched me at the front door. But perhaps in was only a feigned watch. I had to come back quickly in order to send the children off to school. My husband was waiting in the forest in front of one derelict cottage, and I went there to see him. When we parted, he told me that he would be waiting there for the others. But at noon my daughter came running from school and said: ´Mom, uncle Pepída is baking bread and policemen are watching him.´ What was I to do? I ran out, and I met one of the financial guards. He said: ´Mrs. Šrotýřová, nobody will go. There would be a big scandal in Kvilda if all of us left. You have to find Jenda and tell him that we are not going.´”

  • “They led the people to the border and then we didn’t hear anything of them anymore. None of them returned. We didn’t know how it was organized, nor what we were to do. When I was leaving, it was much easier for me, because my husband had already been in Germany for half a year. He already knew what to do. Americans came for us in a Jeep and they took us to Zwiesel. From there we went to an assembly camp near Munich for a so-called screening, which was a background check done by the FBI or what not. They inquired about every one of us. Whether the person was a communist or not, etc. We only passed through, but the others had to stay there and they were later sent to other places from there. There were Czechs, Poles, Hungarians... All of them were escaping, not just Czechs.”

  • “A financial guard inspector arrived in May. He told us that since we had children and one of our daughters was to begin school soon, and since there was no school in Knížecí Pláně, we would be transferred to Kvilda. On June 1, my husband therefore began working as a financial guard in Kvilda. There were no flats, because Germans were still living in Kvilda. American soldiers were still there, too. There was never any shooting. The Germans were never treated badly there. Since my husband had worked in the village administration office a bit, the inspector assigned him to work for the local administration office there. Everything went smoothly. Some of the Germans were social democrats, and therefore they didn’t have to leave. But they said: ´All of our friends are going, so what would we do here by ourselves?´ All of them thus left except one woman.”

  • “We had a pub there. It was a place near Zdíkov, there were about twenty-five houses there. Germans suddenly arrived in September. We had tap-room there, and when the Germans came, they insisted that they would lodge there. There was only me and my mom, and you can imagine that we were scared. But the officer told us not to be afraid, and ordered us not to sell them any beer. They spent the night in our tap-room. They came in the afternoon. At night, I and my mom were sleeping behind a locked door, but somebody knocked on the door. It was the officer again, and he announced to us that they had been ordered to move back. He said they had been supposed to stay near the forest, but they mistakenly advanced a bit further. Thus they left the very same night. They controlled the area of the forest, they constructed a post on the road, and they stayed there throughout the entire war.”

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    Zdíkov, 19.06.2011

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    duration: 05:25:51
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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My husband said: When I was handing them the American passport, my hand was shaking

Anna Šrotýřová in 1950
Anna Šrotýřová in 1950
photo: Archiv Anny Šrotýřové

Anna Šrotýřová was born September 16, 1920 in Zdíkov, in the Šumava Mountains. Her father, who had fought at Piava in WWI, fell ill and died soon after his return from the army. The family inherited a small village pub with a tobacconist shop from him. Anna lived in Zdíkov throughout WWII and she met her husband-to-be Jan Šrotýř there. After the war they moved to Kvilda, where her husband worked as a financial guard. After the communist coup in 1948, he and his colleagues helped those who were threatened by the new political regime to illegally cross the border to the West. He fled to Germany on December 14, 1948, immediately before he was to be arrested. His wife and two daughters followed him six months afterwards. They spent the rest of 1949 and 1950 in Murnau, Bavaria, in a camp for refugees from communist countries, and then they travelled by ship to the USA. They spent their life in Chicago and in nearby Berwyn. Mrs. Šrotýřová returned to Zdíkov only after the death of her husband.