Eliška Šafaříková

* 1924  †︎ 2016

  • “Thanks to a friend I had a job at the Ministry of Agriculture for some time. One day my father came to visit me there in the lobby downstairs, and he arrived there in his uniform from the Auxiliary Technical Battalions, which had no epaulettes. Just imagine: an employee of the ministry meeting her father who was in the ATB. As soon as the next political screening was conducted, I didn’t pass because of this, obviously.”

  • “There was an air raid almost every day in Braunschweig. Everyday we had to run to the shelter; it was going on all the time. When we got out of the shelter, there was an enormous crater just a few metres from us. We also watched the city on fire from the barracks in the labour camps. My mom suffered, because she heard about the air raids on Magdeburg- Braunschweig from the radio. For this reason, she somehow managed to obtain a doctor’s note testifying that she was ill, and therefore I could go home to her already in May. A month later the person in charge brought all the other girls back, too, because the situation there became unbearable as the air raids were happening constantly.”

  • “I remember that we rode a train and that it was actually for the first time that I wore trousers, because it was not common for girls at that time. I remember that our mothers had agreed upon it that it would be practical for us to have trousers, and my mom thus had some trousers fitted for me. A relative had been in the army service, and I thus had dyed trousers from some kind of sturdy army-issue fabric, but apart from that, I packed only one dress with me for the journey to Braunschweig. I already forgot about this, but we left from Borovany for sure. I remember that we went there by train, but I forgot the beginning of the journey. They had to make us get off the train about a kilometre from the train station, because the train station had suffered some damage in an air raid shortly before our arrival, and the tracks were crooked, and therefore they had to take us to the labour camp by bus from there.”

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    Úvaly, 21.01.2014

    (audio)
    délka: 41:25
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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When I was leaving for Germany, it was for the first time that I wore trousers

Eliška Šafaříková
Eliška Šafaříková
zdroj: sběrač Karel Kužel

  Eliška Šafaříková was born July 26, 1924 in Trhové Sviny in the district České Budějovice. Her father was a countryside building contractor and her mother was a housewife. Eliška at first lived with her parents in Trhové Sviny and then in nearby Jílovice. She attended the girls‘ elementary school in Trhové Sviny and after completing the fifth grade she transferred to the eight-year Jirsík‘s Czech State Grammar School in České Budějovice. She graduated from this school in 1943 and her father subsequently employed her in his office in the saw-mill in Trhové Sviny. Nevertheless, she was unable to avoid forced labour. Her friends from the grammar school who worked in České Budějovice went to work somewhere in Austria, but Eliška was sent together with other people from Trhové Sviny to Braunschweig in Germany. She did not work in a factory there, but she worked in an office of an old bachelor where she spent her time filling out charts and registering spare parts numbers. Every day she witnessed air raids and from the labour camp they often watched the city engulfed in fires. When the work could no longer be done due to the continuing air raids, the Germans moved the factories underground and they began to staff them mostly with Russian prisoners of war instead. Eliška was transported back home and sent to do forced labour in the factory JIKOV (South Bohemian Metalworks Velešín), where she worked as a telephone operator thanks to her fluent German. She worked there until the end of the war. After the war she attended a one-year course for secretaries in Prague-Smíchov. In February 1948 their steam saw-mill in Trhové Sviny, which had been established by her grandfather in 1900, became confiscated by the state, the family was evicted from their house and her father was sent to work in a saw-mill in Jindřichův Hradec and then in the Auxiliary Technical Battalions. Eliška Šafaříková was employed at the Ministry of Agriculture, and then as a courtroom recorder in the court in Prague 6. For more than twenty years she worked as a secretary in the company IPS (Engineering and Industrial Construction). She has three children and she lives in Úvaly u Prahy.