Marie Holomková

Marie Holomková came from the village of Horní Němčí, where she grew up in the family of the blacksmith Josef Vaškových. Marie’s mother, from the Kubík family of musicians from Strážnice, was a housewife and raised five children in addition to Marie: [Františka], Josef, Cyril, Metoděj and Ludvík. The family lived in a mud-brick house with a garden in a part of the village known as Chaloupky. Her blacksmith father did not shoe horses, but manufactured carpenter’s clamps, chains and similar items, and also worked for the community or for the local peasants. He was paid in money or in kind. The children attended school: Marie Holomková completed eight classes in the higher elementary school, after which she moved to Zlín as an apprentice at the Baťa factory, where she boarded.

In 1942, Marie Holomková had to surrender her so-called G*psy identity card. She was working in Zlín at the time. She managed to join her brother Cyril in Wiener Neustadt and work there. Meanwhile, her parents had been deported to Auschwitz II-Birkenau; when she came to visit them in Horní Němčí on holiday, the mayor denounced her to the Gestapo. She was arrested and imprisoned in Uherské Hradiště, then in Zlín and finally in Brno in the prison at Cejl. There she worked as a cleaner for the Brno police inspector Klement Boda,[1] who probably saved her life by having her sent to Austria, where she worked until the end of the war.

[1]Klement Boda was an inspector of the Protectorate Criminal Police in Brno who managed to save several members of Tomáš Holomek’s family from being transported to concentration camps.