Věra Chudobová

* 1935

  • "My husband's brother fled to Germany. Another one, who was in the air force, fled to Australia. Who else was there? He was there for a long time, Pepík died in Australia. Who else did we have, Petra in Germany, Pepík in Australia... did we have anyone else? Everyone from my side was in Germany. My grandmother was German, she was born near Dresden, but she spoke Czech. My grandmother lived here with us for about ten years when she was old. She moved in with us when she was eighty and died at ninety. My husband said that we speak Czech at home, but she can speak Czech or German, whichever she prefers. And Grandma spoke German and Czech, so we somehow managed to communicate. When you want to, you can always understand each other."

  • "In 1945, after the war was over, the principal came to us one day with a pretty girl and said, 'Here's your new friend, she'll be in your class now, be nice to her. She hasn't had an easy life, she was in a concentration camp and had a hard time, so be nice to her and help her with everything.' And she was extremely smart. She was Jewish, her name was Ruth Feldman. She was very pretty and smart, she could do everything. She learned quickly and knew Czech and German, she was good at everything. But she wasn't very good with her hands, they were always sticky, so she couldn't sew or embroider. So I knitted for her, and the teacher always knew she hadn't knitted it, and she said she hadn't. She never lied, she was a very nice girl."

  • "The Americans were the worst; they flew one after another and dropped their bomb like that. We said they were the biggest brutes. Then the British flew, and they flew in a scattered formation; there were a lot of Czechs there. They didn't drop any bombs. We had an unexploded bomb in this building; they dropped it here. If it had exploded, we would all have been killed, but it didn't, so they left it uncovered and after the war, they turned the place into an elevator. For the last three months, we only slept in the basements at night. During the day, we walked around if possible, but otherwise we had to hide because it was quite dangerous. It wasn't nice during the war."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Týnec nad Labem, 09.02.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 01:22:29
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Many Germans were decent people. No one reported that we were listening to London

Věra Chudobová at the age of one (1936)
Věra Chudobová at the age of one (1936)
zdroj: Witness archive

Věra Chudobová was born on May 26, 1935, in Brno to the family of sales representative Vojtěch Vacek and his wife Marie, who made a living sewing hats. Věra Chudobová grew up in Brno‘s Veveří neighborhood in a house with German neighbors, with whom the family never had any problems. During the war, they listened to broadcasts from London and no one ever reported them. At the end of the war, the witness experienced frequent bombing, and her family moved out of Brno for a short time because of it. After the war, they returned to their apartment and witnessed the expulsion of the Germans. Věra Chudobová attended elementary and middle school in Brno. She then graduated from the Business Academy in Kolín and began working as a financial accountant at the Prague-based company Energoinvest. She married in 1955 and had two daughters. The Chudoba family was abroad at the time of the invasion by Warsaw Pact troops and did not return to Czechoslovakia until October 1968. Part of their family lived in exile, which is why the witness’s daughters had problems getting into secondary school. No one in the family was a member of the Communist Party. In 2024, Věra Chudobová was living in Týnec nad Labem.