Eliška Leščinská

* 1925

  • "I remember that we were just leaving school and we had to walk past the main road from Pilsen to Prague. Of course, it was cold when they got there. I remember one car after another. Tanks, all of them. I remember them breaking down. There were a lot of tanks getting into crashes. It was terrible. I remember the Germans; how much hatred towards them there was in us. How we wished them to bruise eachother and get hurt as much as possible.”

  • "I remember. I know that I was literally in love with Masaryk. Masaryk was someone incredible to me... He was simply a demigod. You can't imagine how much we at school and everyone else respected Masaryk and how much we admired him. I would really say that he was... But when Beneš came, he came at such a time… I don't know exactly what it was… I know that somehow we didn't have that same relationship towards him. It was something completely... it wasn't Masaryk anymore. Of course, when the war began, we felt sorry for him. But when he became president just after Masaryk, he was not very popular. I don't know why this was the case, but I just know... Whereas Masaryk - he was a demigod."

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    Horní Bříza, 11.10.2021

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Masaryk was a demigod

A photograph from her wedding, 1950
A photograph from her wedding, 1950
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Eliška Leščinská was born on October 14, 1925 in the village of Sirá in the Rokycan region, where her father František Hrabák ran a farm, a country pub and was also appointed as mayor. She and her brothers, František and Miroslav, went to primary school in Lhota pod Radčem. Later on she would walk all the way to the secondary school in Mýto. It was on her way to school that she bumped into German troops that were occupying the republic in March 1939. During the Second World War, she finished school and was subsequently employed at the „straw barn“ in Zbiroh, where she manufactured tools for soldiers. She often met up with relatives from Prague who would go to the countryside to get food supplies. When the war ended, she graduated from the School for Housewives in Rokycany. After the February coup in 1948, her father joined the “jednotné zemědělské družstvo” (JZD, Unified Agricultural Cooperative), as did most of the inhabitants of Sirá. In 1950, she married Jiří Leščínský in Horní Bříza, where she started to work in a kindergarten. First as the kindergarten caretaker, and later, after completing her teacher training, she worked as a teacher. In 2021, the witness lived in Horní Bříza with her son and daughter-in-law.