Eleonora Kosová

• Testimony abstract

  Before the War During the War After the War

  The Bystřický family lived in Vyškov; the survivor said it was in the Jewish cemetery. Her father Martin Bystřický provided for the family as a horse trader and carter, her mother's name was Antonie, née Richtrová. In 1925 their first daughter Antonie was born, two years later Božena. The eldest son, Antonín, was born in 1933, followed a year later by his brother Jan. She said the neighbours in Vyškov treated them perfectly. Eleonora, Antonie and brother Antonín had their father's pale skin, and Eleonora also inherited her father's blue eyes.

  One evening in 1942, her parents began packing their belongings, saying that the local gendarme had urged them to run away, otherwise they would have to go to a concentration camp. They left at night, then walked through the woods and along field paths, and finally took refuge in the forest around Buchlov. Her uncle Adolf Richtr and her father's cousin Jakub Richtr from Vyškov fled together with the Bystřickýs.

  One spring or summer morning in 1943, while they were spending the night close to the road, they were noticed by the driver of a horse-drawn cart. He probably thought they were partisans, because not long afterwards the family was surrounded by the Gestapo and Czech police. The mother, who had just returned from shopping in the village, wanted to hide behind a tree with five-year-old Eleonora in her arms, but one of the uniformed men, who reportedly spoke Czech badly, spotted them and started swearing at them and making dangerous threats. The family was then taken to the prison in Zdounky. It was a makeshift prison consisting of one large room where the warder or turnkey and his wife, who wore a Moravian-Slovak costume, lived. They wanted to separate the detained Roma, by placing the men and boys, and women and girls in different rooms. Little Eleonora was supposed to be placed among the boys who were as small as she was, but she burst into tears, slipped under the police officers' hands and refused to let go of her mother, so in the end she was allowed to stay with her. Eleonora remembered how they were given potato goulash in mugs every day, but the food smelled of soap, which she said was perhaps grated into it deliberately. Also interned with them in Zdounky were partisans who had been hiding in the woods like them.

  After about two or three months[1] the Bystřickýs were taken to the workhouse – a prison at Cejl in Brno. Here they gained protection because their father had gone to school with local Protectorate policemen in Vyškov. The survivor said the police inspector [Klement] Boda, together with [Oldřich] Nejezchleba and [Rudolf] Veselý put their files at the bottom so that it would not be their turn when decision was taken about who would be deported to Auschwitz, who would be placed in another concentration camp, and who would be released. Eleonora's mother and her sister and brother were all darker-skinned, so they were hidden in a cell that the Gestapo supposedly did not know about. Other family members, she said, were on show. So she came face to face with Detective Chief Inspector [Franz] Herzig, of the German criminal police, and she still remembered him grabbing her by the earlobe and referring to her in German as "no Gypsy." The aforementioned police officers then vouched for them, saying that the family had always lived properly, never cheated, and the father had always worked. Thanks to that, they were able to release them in 1944.

  • [1] She could not remember precisely, saying she was very young at the time.

  She said the Czech police officers [Oldřich] Nejezchleba and [Rudolf] Veselý continued to work for the criminal police. Eleonora Kosová married Bruno Kos, who was from a Jewish family and received a disability pension as a result of his imprisonment in a concentration camp.

  Eleonora Kosová first worked as a nurse, and after 1989 she ran a fashion shop in Prostějov.

• Origin of Testimony

  The interview with Eleonora Kosová was recorded by the Museum of Romani Culture in Prostějov in September 2003; her brother Jan Bystřický also participated in the interview. The narrative is accompanied by a set of six family photographs from the 1930s to 2003.

• Where to find this testimony

  Jana Horváthová et al. (eds), ...to jsou těžké vzpomínky. Vzpomínky Romů a Sintů na život před válkou a v protektorátu [...these are painful memories. Reminiscences of Roma and Sinti about life before the war and during the Protectorate]