Late in the evening of Sunday March 13, 1949, somebody silently knocked the parsonage door. The parish cook opened the door and saw a group of four young people wearing bundles. At that moment it occurred to her these may be the refugees from Czechoslovakia. They were looking there for help. The…
The small railway station in Austria border town Pleissing was quiet and peaceful on March 13, 1949. The railwayman, who was on duty, was enjoying the silence and suddenly he saw four young people. They were carefully checking out the building and one of them who spoke German, entered and took…
In 1949, Julie Hrušková who just turned twenty met a co-worker who urgently needed to be guarded across the border. Because she also hated the communists and her father was a game warden in the borderlands, they firmed the plans soon and decided to escape together with two other young guys. M…
In March 1949 the group of young people from Czechoslovakia decided to cross the borders to Austria. The head of this group was Julie Hrušková, whose father was a game warden in a nearby Vranov. Julie, the child of the woods, knew the terrain very well. At about three o´clock in the afternoon th…
After the Second World War the South-West Vienna Railway Station was in the Soviet occupation zone. Julie Hrušková and the friends she escaped with to Austria in March 1949, knew that potential arrest by the Soviets would have had very bad consequences. A railwayman from Pleissing gave them the i…
On Monday March 14, 1949 at eight o´clock in the morning four young people came to the 430th department of American CIC that was in the Porzellangasse Street in Vienna. The first one to prove her identity was a young girl, the officer shouted out: “Jeez, you are Julie Hrušková!” It was true. “Yes…
Julie Hrušková got to the refugees camp Wegscheid on March 16th, 1949. “The camp was halved by the road. One of the parts was for the Jews and the other for the rest of us. We used to go by the camp, lay on the grass, look at the Alps and talked about everything,” she recalled. Julie soon became …
In 1951, Irena Šimonová - by then a political prisoner - was assigned to work in a brick factory in Červené Pečky. She had to work every day in the so-called "aluminum," where she toiled and mined brick clay. Irena recalls that the workers were under the supervision of an old man, a civilian, who…
On March 21, 1949, Irena Šimonová attempted to cross the border and get into West Germany. She had a legitimate fear of being arrested and thus wanted to follow in the footsteps of her friend František Smrček, who by then had already been in exile. Operating from Germany, Smrček arranged a smug…
Irena Šimonová came to the prison hospital in Pankrac in 1949. The preceding custody and in particular the brutal interrogations broke her health and thus she had to be placed in the hospital even before the court ruling. According to Irena, the hospital was also immersed in an atmosphere of f…
In September 1951, the political prisoners Irena Šimonová and her friend Helena escaped from prison and from a mine that produced brick clay where they were forced to work. Their plan and hope was to cross the nearby border to the West. Irena was desperate and exhausted, running away from the i…
The name of the famous luxury hotel Alcron is derived from the first letters of the name of its owner - Alois Krofta. In addition to Alcron, Krofta also owned the Flóra hotel, where by the end of the 1940s, Irena Šimonová worked as an employee directly subordinated to Krofta. According to her me…
The girls' dormitory in Kubelíkova Street in Prague, that was ran by the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross after WWII, became the scene of the third resistance in the years 1948 - 1949. Irena Šimonová - one of the girls living in the dorm - got involved in resistance ac…