Eva Štěpánková

* 1948

  • "I don't know exactly chronologically where he was, but he was in Opava, he was in Leopoldov, Opava, Bory and Pankrác, but I don't know when, where, how. He may have been in Pankrác at the time of the resumption of the process. I was there, in Pankrác, we talked through some window, I was also in Leopoldov, I was still small, he had to be there somehow from the beginning, after the process, because I was, I was definitely small and I had a nightmare for many years, because someone took us there. Some STB officer took us there, I don't know who it was, we drove in Skoda 603, and we drove at night, we arrived there in the morning, and I know that there was such a huge meadow, then the fortress, the Leopoldov, it had terribly high and thick walls, there was a very small gate in it, and we went through it, and when it closed, my heart was completely sunk. It thought that I would never get out of there again. The feeling, I always had a dream that I went there, across the lawn, across the meadow, and then the door closed behind me. And now I was talking to my brother, now I recently asked him if he was there, I didn't remember it, he was there too and he had that feeling too, but he didn't have those dreams, that's what I had."

  • "Mom said that our dad was arrested, innocent, and that it would be explained and that he would return. So, we proudly walked and claimed, we were saying we have a dad innocently imprisoned in jail… We knew it… We believed in his innocence. Which was probably very important for our feeling from it all… My mom had a clear idea of what it was all about. Dad wrote letters, and in those letters when they let him write, and they didn't cross it out with black ink, I got them somewhere at home, if you're interested,… and in those letters he wrote to my mom, as if in ciphers or other allegories, that the people who kept him there were fascists. So, it was very clear to my mother. And besides, she had news from Hungary, where, of course, the same thing was happening, there was a trial with Rajek, it was exactly the same thing. So, she knew. Did it influence mom's convictions anyhow? They were convinced that it was within the people that other people came to power there, and for example in '68 they were both enthusiastic fighters for socialism with a human face. Dad was not recovered until 1971, when he was fired for the second time. And he left the Communist Party district committee and said, "I'm floating, I'm flying, I don't have a red book." Only then did he realize it. … He still believed, he still believed the whole time he was in jail. All the time while he was imprisoned, when he could, he shouted that he was a communist and that they were wrong and that he would explain it to them. He was convinced, that by someone that some people who were not real communists had got there. "

  • "My mother, such a humorous story, my mother was a fashion designer and she was making costume designs for some theaters and cabarets, and her friend and she invented things like that, to celebrate the liberation by the Soviet army, that the girls in a cabaret wore only sickles, hammers and five-pointed stars. Which was funny, but the Soviets were a little picky about it, so they arrested the nice designer. And my mom was so energetic, so she went to scream at the Russians, to let her go immediately, she meant well, and there she met Dad, who told her to be quiet, he arranged that they let the friend go, that's how they met. At the end of the war, when Budapest was liberated. My mother then joined them, she was given a uniform and was also in the Soviet army, then they went to Bratislava, liberated Bratislava and Vienna. And then they returned to Prague, because Dad found out that he has several of his siblings who survived the war in Prague."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 03.12.2018

    (audio)
    délka: 01:50:26
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

They will hang your dad like they did to Mr. Slánský

Her parents in 1945
Her parents in 1945
zdroj: Eva Štěpánková

Eva Štěpánková was born on April 23, 1948 in Prague. Her father Jan Bárta was originally called Jen Braunstein and came from an Orthodox Jewish family from Subcarpathian Ukraine. Her mother Marie Fisher came from Budapest, where her parents met at the end of the war. The mother avoided transports to the concentration camps, the father lived in Budapest under a false identity. As an ardent communist, he offered his services to the Soviets. Both parents settled in Prague after the war. Her father worked his way up to the position of a party deputy of the state-owned company České energetické závody. He was arrested on November 22, 1952 and convicted of high treason in 1954. That same year, Eva went to first grade, remembering the visits to her father in prison. Her father was released on amnesty in 1960, his university degree was taken away from him, and he had to go to work as a maintenance worker in a factory. After three years, he underwent rehabilitation. The occupation of 1968 caught a witness on holiday in Romania. The witness‘s father and brothers traveled to Vienna, the brothers soon returned home, and the father did not return until 1969. The parents got divorced, and the father was expelled from the Communist Party for the second time. Eva graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University and in 1971 she joined the Research Institute of Mathematical Machines (VÚS), where she spent twenty years. She got married in 1975 and had gradually three children. She was widowed in 2007.