Margareta Peck

* 1948

  • “They were under constant surveillance in Baragan. Dad walked around with the police. They picked up mum and dad in the morning, they were always supervised. They even followed us children, me and Josef Havlíček and other children. I guess Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Ana Pauker always flew over us in a small airplane, I think to photograph us or to see what was going on. Guess what we did. We lifted our dresses or whatever and slapped our bare bottoms and swore as profanely as we could. We just kept swearing, the rudest words we could learn.”

  • “Our health was bad. I didn’t tell you; when we came to Baragan – they kicked us out – mum had to cut the clothes my sister and I were wearing, socks and all. We were covered in festering sores. She wanted to wash us, but there was no water, so they brought water to us in a tank over 12 kilometres. When you filled a bottle with the water, there was this much water and that much salt on the bottom. It was so salty, and that was all we had for drinking and washing. We [sister and I] cried like baboons. It was driving us crazy. I guess I feared the doctors; anything can traumatise you. You will get scared. So, she cut our clothes up so she could take them off. She poured the water on us to take them off, as we were all covered in festering sores. I don’t know how long we travelled. I think it was two months. No washing. Imagine what we looked like. We must have looked worse than animals, and we rode in animal cars. No railway carriages, just boxcars, for animals.”

  • “My parents made bricks, put them into boxes, and let them dry. Some were baked, some… and they started building. They built the hospital, school, the town hall, and so on. My dad made sure the school would be built when he went to Bucharest. Dad, as each other man, dug out a pit, about two by three metres. They told us, this is where you’ll live. So, dad dug out the pit. Where should we stay when it is so windy? When he came, we covered ourselves with mats. Sister and I got into a wardrobe and mum sat with us. We covered it with mats and metal sheets. I don’t know... dad put metal sheets on the floor in the rail cars; he was a tinsmith. He put them over it, and the wind took them away. They flew up like banknotes. It was so windy – no trees, nothing. Where could we live…? So, dad dug out a pit and told mum: ‘I will first kill the children, then you, then myself.’”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Ústí nad Labem, 02.03.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:35:57
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Dad dug out a pit in Baragan and told mum: I will kill the children first, then you, then myself

Margareta Peck (right), Eibenthal, latter 1950s
Margareta Peck (right), Eibenthal, latter 1950s
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Margareta Peck, née Fiklová, was born on 4 June 1948 in the Nové Doly (Baia Nouă) community close to Eibenthal, a Czech village in Romania’s Banat region. She was born into a family of descendants of Czech colonists five years after her elder sister Anna and, along with their parents, they lived in a rented house in a worker colony inhabited primarily by miners’ families. Her father František served in the Romanian military during World War II, fighting alongside Nazi Germany until August 1944. In June 1951, the Communist Party of Romania deported the four members of the Fikl family to the Baragan region to which the regime relocated and deported politically unreliable persons under pressure from Soviet Union. The deportees were forced to leave their homes within hours and were allowed to only bring along a few of their personal belongings. The authorities released them in an uninhabited landscape without any means, and they were not allowed to leave the area. The Fikls and other families first built simple houses, and the place started turning into the Rubla community over time. Romanian authorities allowed Czech families to leave for the mining town of Comanesti, Romania at the end of 1951; they were still under government surveillance. The Fikls did not return home until early 1956. Grandfather Josef Fikl died in Comanesti and never got to come back home. The family found their home in poor conditions, with most of their belongings seized by the local national committee or stolen by the locals. The witness went to Romanian school in Comanesti, then in Eibenthal, facing issue with the Czech language. Having completed primary school, she worked in Eibenthal, and with husband and two children, they moved to Oršava later on and she worked at the local shipyard. The government granted her financial indemnification for the deportation to Baragan after 1989. The witness would visit her son in the Czech Republic throughout the 1990s and moved over for good eventually. At the time of recording, she was living in Ústí nad Labem (March 2023).