Alice Mayerová

* 1936

  • "And among other things, we did work on various shafts. I also worked at the power station, from fifteen to eighteen we could only work on the surface. When I was eighteen, I dared to apply for a part-time job in the mine. Well, maybe I went too far, I don't know. There was me, a girl from a pedagogical school in Orlová and another one from a nursing school. I don't know where she ended up, but two of us stayed there and cleaned the belts. And it was so dirty that before we finished, it was dirty again. We got shovels and that was it. We had to bring our clothes, we didn't get anything. Well, it was a rarity for the miners to have girls working in the Gabriela mine. Most didn't have the courage. Once I met a guy, his face was all black, and he said to me, 'For God's sake, what are you doing here?' I stared at him. I didn't recognize him but he was a neighbour who lived right across the street from us. He recognized me, but I didn't recognize him."

  • "I was born to my mother after ten years of marriage, at seven months of pregnancy. My mom said, 'If it wasn't for your grandmother, you wouldn't be here because I didn't know what to do. When you were born, you were blue and purple and you were bursting with every colour and I was afraid to touch you.' So I was nursed by my grandmother who bathed and fed me. She fed me with a soggy bread and sugar wrapped in a piece of cloth, like a dummy. The bread and sugar was my sustenance. She would wrap me up and put me in the oven to keep me warm."

  • "Our family survived by having a 'volksliste' (German People's List). The Germans differentiated between volksliste 1, 2, and most of our people were forced to have volksliste 3 because of their work and because they didn't want to be expelled. That was the one that most ordinary people had, who were primarily concerned with their livelihood. We also had it. My father was out of work for some time and there was nothing to eat. I didn't notice it so much as a kid, but my parents were struggling to make a living, so my father used to hunt sparrows and crows in the winter. Together with the neighbours, he also used to fish illegally in the river. In the evening they'd set some baskets in the river and in the morning they'd go get the fish that got stuck in the basket. He did what he could."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Ostrava, 03.08.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 02:00:03
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The miners were surprised to see a girl working in the mine

Alice Mayerová on a trip in Prague - in a dress she made herself. In 1955
Alice Mayerová on a trip in Prague - in a dress she made herself. In 1955
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Alice Mayerová, née Ličmanová, was born on 28 March 1936 in Stonava. Her grandmother Barbora Ličmanová was a midwife who delivered hundreds of babies in Karviná region. Her father was a miner in the Gabriela mine. She grew up in very modest circumstances in a nationally diverse environment. In 1951 she entered the secondary industrial school where she graduated in mining engineering. There were only three girls in the class and it was the first time that girls were admitted to this course. In 1953, as a student, she was brought to the savings bank in Karviná to help with the tasks related to the monetary reform. In 1955 she finished her studies and worked as a temporary worker directly in the mine. After working in a housing enterprise in Havířov, she returned to the coal environment. Until her retirement she worked at the Institute of Coal Research in Ostrava-Radvanice. She remembers the tense relations between Czechs and Poles in Karviná and from her youth she remembers exactly how the villages, that have now disappeared, looked like.