Zdena Beková

* 1926

  • “Many of the Czechs who worked for the Baťa company around the world would come back home to visit their families. It took them about a year or so. One of them was the director of an English company in East Tilbury in Essex. I thought to myself that I had to get there so I went to him and asked him if it was possible to get a place at his factory in Tilbury if I could perfect my English. He told me to address one of the staff dealing with personnel, that he’d send me all the required documents.”

  • “I know that the German soldiers were in our garden by the end of August 1939, before they marched to Poland. It was on that little hill. They deployed their radio transmitter there. They lived in that kitchen. I know that they spent two days and two nights there and then, on the early morning of September the 1st, they marched to Cieszyn in Poland.”

  • “Two years before the end of the war, they started threatening, that they would send the age group that concerned me to forced labor to Germany. My oldest brother, who was a teacher and had a lot of acquaintances in Ostrava-Přívoz, found me a job at the train station in Ostrava. It was a branch of the station serving only trains from and to the Vítkovice works and then there was the train going to Frýdek-Místek. That’s where I learned to send telegraph about the departure and arrival of trains. It was twelve hours of work and then twenty-four hours of rest.”

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    Velká Británie, 05.08.2012

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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I knew right away after the war that I would leave to England

Zdena Beková
Zdena Beková
zdroj: Martin Reichl

Mrs. Zdena Beková was born on 28 October, 1926, in Brušperk in northern Moravia. She comes from a large family with four brothers and two sisters. Her father worked on the field and later opened up a workshop for processing fabrics. Zdena graduated from a business school in Ostrava. At the end of the war, in order to avoid forced labor in Germany, she worked as a radiotelegraph operator at the railway station in Ostrava, where she experienced many bombings. In August 1945, she went to Prague to study English at a language school. She found her first job as an assistant in a law office, and later, thanks to her knowledge of English, she worked for the Baťa Company. In December 1946, she went to the Baťa factory in Essex in England to work there for one year. However, she has never returned from England to Czechoslovakia again. She married Jan Nehoslav Bek, a veteran of the Czechoslovak exterritorial army. Together they worked for Baťa in what then used to be Rhodesia and in India. Her husband died in 1980. Zdena Beková lives in London.