Miroslava Pěčková

* 1942

  • “There is a beautiful church in Orlová on the square. On the hill. A beautiful church in which there was an excellent pastor. Initially, he taught religion to a group of children at our school. And he always told us, 'Maidens, when you cross the square, stop at the wine parish.' And as we were coming back from the parade on May 1, it was raining and he was already waiting for us. ,Come here. You have to dry up here.‘ So we went to have wine in the parish. From the May Day parade. A communist spoke to us there, and here we went to see the pastor. He was fun, an amazing man."

  • "We were terribly uncomfortable when a member from the Communist Party had to go with us on every trip. It even happened to us once, it was I think when we went to Italy that there was no place for our coach. In short, we thought that it could not be true that the coach would not go. But some security guard and a cop. So we decided that if the coach didn't go, we wouldn't go anywhere either. In the end, they expanded it to include the coach. But there the official had to go with us too. And most of the time, these people did a disgrace there."

  • "We experienced it terribly in Radvanice. Because what the chimneys spewed into the air, that was just terrible. Dad went to work early in the morning. Then, when I went out, I saw his footprints in the red and rusty dust. Like fresh snow. If we opened the window, we had to sweep the red ugly dust from the windowsill every day. We could not use the garden at all at that time. The grass was so dirty that we couldn't even mow it. We had to grind the scythe forever, because there was iron everywhere. When you walked through the taller grass, you had black-and-red legs in half a calf. Dusty shoes. We couldn't just leave something in the garden. There was one bench. We had to wipe it when we wanted to sit down. And sometimes you couldn't go out at all. It was impossible to breathe there."

  • "In 1948, you were six years old. Do you remember any of that communist coup? - I remember mainly our unfortunate grandfather. They took his barber shop. That was his whole life. And now suddenly what's next? The shops changed to Sources and the Future. I remember those unhappy people. We all knew them. They were neighbours. There were a lot of merchants in Radvanice. - Do you remember some of the names associated with those companies? -Sure. There was a Duda store. Olsar was there. There was a Magera butcher's shop on Lipina on the hill. Dad's cousin was there. Then there was the restaurant U Bajgera. It is still called the same. Upstairs was the U Jaterky restaurant. Next to us was the textile Pešl. Hardware store Žingor. There was a lot of it. Everyone focused on something else."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Ostrava, 25.03.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 03:17:21
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Smoke of a different color rolled from each chimney. The river stinked terribly

Miroslava Pěčková around the 1st half of 1960s
Miroslava Pěčková around the 1st half of 1960s
zdroj: archiv Miroslavy Pěčkové

Miroslava Pěčková, née Pavelková, was born on January 10, 1942 in Ostrava. She grew up and spent her whole life in the Radvanice district. Her father was a car mechanic, the mother saleswoman. Grandfather Arnošt Pavelek was a Czechoslovak legionary. Probably in 1920 he experienced the return of legionnaires from Vladivostok to their homeland. This is evidenced by the collection of postcards from the boat trip owned by Miroslava Pěčková. After February 1948, the Communists nationalized the barber shop for Arnošt Pavelek, and Miroslav witnessed the nationalization of dozens of other trades, crafts and shops in Radvanice. In the 1950s, she observed the construction of Klement Gottwald‘s New Ironworks in Ostrava and the extremely poor impact of its operations on the environment. She graduated from the Pedagogical Institute and commuted to teach in Orlová in the Karviná region. There she observed the coexistence of new inhabitants of the mining colony. Especially Czechs, Slovaks and Roma. In 2016, doctors diagnosed Miroslava Pěčková with lung cancer, from which she was cured. The husband died of cancer in 2018.