Gerlinda Frajzová, U Opavice 2, August 8, 2018
“The world was so mixed up that one didn’t know where one belonged.”
Gerlinda Frajzová was born in 1932. At the time of this interview she was 86 years old and very active. Except for a brief period right after WWII, when her family temporarily moved to Moravská Třebová, she has spent her entire life in the neighborhood of today’s U Opavice apartment blocks. She remembers the neighborhood from before when the apartment blocks were built here because this is where she spent her childhood. Mrs. Frajzová had nine siblings and got married at 16. Her husband died at the age of 49, when she was only 44, and she never remarried. With the exception of a five-year maternity leave, she worked her whole life, mostly in warehouses. With her husband they had two daughters, and one of them, Eva Kostková (also interviewed for this project), lives at U Opavice 4. Mrs. Frajzová lived for many years in a family house on the nearby Mostní street that her husband had inherited, but for her retirement she moved to an apartment at U Opavice 2. In the interview she talks about the time when Opava was still called Troppau, and recalls how she attended first Czech schools, then German schools, and then Czech schools again. She also recalls hunger, raids and the war time in Opava, the deportation of the Jewish population, the arrival of the Russian army and the post-war expulsion of Germans.
