Day 8 - April 13, 2010 - Trsice

Today we experienced the hospitality of Trsice, a small village a few miles from Olomouc, where the family of Otto Wolf was hidden for three years during the Holocaust. As we drove to City Hall, we passed the frog sculpture, representing the town crest, that sits high on a hill overlooking travellers. We were greeted by the Mayor Leona Stejsksalova and her assistant in the traditional way, with bread, salt and plum brandy. After a tour of the new historical museum, including the dungeon, the mayor led us into a conference room where our special friends, Mrs. Ohera and Dr. Brezina narrated the Otto Wolf story. Thanks to our friend and guide, Ilona, we were able to understand all of our Czech friends because today, as yesterday, she translated continually for us. Dr. Brezina was a small child when the Wolfs were hidden in the woods, and he remembers the shed that Slavek, one of their helpers, would lock them in during the day. One day Dr. Brezina, then 7 years old, heard voices inside the shed and tried to get in, but suddenly the voices stopped. It wasn’t until later that he found out the Wolf family had been hiding there. At the end of the presentations, the mayor presented each of us with a T-shirt specially made for our group, of the new frog sculpture with the name of the town, Trsice.

The Mayor then led us to the Trsice cemetery, where there is a memorial to Otto Wolf and the 18 other residents of Trsice and Zakrov who were killed April 20, 1945 because Nazis suspected them of being partisans. Eerily we approached this cemetery and images from the pictures that Mrs. Ohera had given us of the procession in May of 1945 flashed through our minds.
The Mayor treated us to a wonderful lunch at a quaint restaurant of Trsice. While there, Mrs. Ohera identified people from the pictures that she had provided for Mrs. Tambuscio. After lunch our bus travelled the 2 kilometers to Zakrov, where the Ohera family still lives, and where her parents hid the Wolf family in the spring of 1945. Down the street from the Ohera home, we viewed a monument for the 19 young men who were arrested, tortured, locked in a barn and burned to death. As the rain drizzled, we stood in silence, thinking about Otto Wolf, whose diary we all read back home in Kansas, California, and New Jersey. Now we stand here in the Czech Republic, meeting people who knew the Wolfs, standing in their home towns, and seeing the field and forest where the Wolf family hid.

We travelled into Poland, where they are observing a national week of mourning for the President Lech Kaczynski and other government and religious leaders who were killed in the tragic plane crash last weekend: a sobering atmosphere for tomorrow, our day at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Kayla says:

After reading Otto Wolf's diary, I learned that Otto Wolf had been murdered with eighteen other men after being tortured by Nazis. I didn't know, however, that the murders had been unwarranted. The Nazis had been sent to Trsice with a list of nineteen men suspected of being part of the resistance. However, the Nazis lost this list but instead of obtaining a new list, they simply took nineteen men at random who were between the ages of 18 and 40 and locked them in a house. Because Otto happened to be at the Ohera house in hiding, he was arrested with the other men. The men were then tortured and burned; some were burned alive. This made me realize that the Gestapo had been brainwashed to the extent where they did these heinous acts simply so it would not look like they were wrong. They were so committed to upholding their supremacy that they did not simply shoot these men, but tortured them first, creating martyrs.