Pavlína Pešková

* 1929

  • “When we were still in Košice and I was about eight, my parents took out insurance policies, two policies, worth ten thousand crowns each, and they told me, I can clearly remember as we were walking down the street, I know they told me that when I turned eighteen, I would have twenty thousand in dowry. And then in 1953 the monetary reform came and it was all gone. Those were fixed deposits and the money was released from the bankbook so we could buy a baby pram or furniture that we got on a newlywed loan. When we were making a purchase, the funds we needed were released from the bankbook and of course they were cut back because the currency exchange rate was one to five and one to fifty. There were two rates, practically. The money ready at our disposal at home was exchanged at the one-to-fifty rate, that on bankbooks was exchanged at one to five.“

  • ”But how it was disclosed: it was disclosed because back then, there were probably four boys, or we can say four young men actually, who were involved in the leaflet operation, and they all happened to be the same age and doing military service. And one of them got a leave and overstayed it, so he had some trouble. He was told that if he had had some information on someone, the expected punishment would have been mitigated. So he recalled the leaflets, reported them and actually turned himself in, too. He was also punished then and I would say his sentence was even longer than my husband’s. Had it not been for him, it would have never been disclosed. At first, it was thought that they were a bigger group, then it kind of unraveled until his and everybody else’s case ended up in the district court. There the sentences were more lenient, or lenient, I would say.”

  • “My husband got conscripted in fall, in October. I heard from him at the beginning of the military service and then I did not hear anything. So I set out to Litoměřice where he was posted. There I was told that he was at a military training because he had not been answering any of my letters. So I went back home reassured and telling myself: ‘If he’s at the training, he’ll be back for Christmas or New Year.’ Once, while thinking this way, the second wife of my father (because my father got re-married in 1946, I had been his housekeeper for about two years before and it probably was quite challenging for me at that time when food was rationed and we only got a cup of milk per day, difficult time it was, well… my daddy was posted somewhere else, he was escorting prisoners to work in various factories sometimes then), and I was alone at home with her and I said: ‘When he’s back for Christmas...’ And she replied: ‘He isn’t.’ So I asked: ‘Why?’ And she told me: ‘Because he’s over there’...And like this she pointed through the window as if toward the prison. This way I found out that my husband was in prison facing a 14-year sentence. He was found there by a relative who worked there and told so to my father’s second wife. So I found out that though I was expecting a baby, my husband was locked up for fourteen years.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    České Budějovice, 26.05.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 51:53
  • 2

    České Budějovice, 16.06.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 29:26
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Fall of communism took me by surprise in a pleasant way, I had stopped counting on it

With her one-year-old daughter Vladimíra
With her one-year-old daughter Vladimíra
zdroj: Archiv pamětnice

Pavlína Pešková, née Šachová, was born on 9 May 1929 into a Czech family in the Slovak city of Košice. In the fall of 1938 when she was nine, she and her parents fled back to Bohemia after the Hungarian occupation of southern and eastern Slovakia. After the war, she witnessed the execution of K. H. Frank. In the 1950s, her first husband Ladislav Vokatý should have been sentenced to 14 years in a political show trial, eventually, he spent three years as a prisoner mining uranium in Jáchymov. Their marriage broke up two years later apparently due to the separation and harsh prison conditions. In 1971 Ladislav Vokatý died as a result of radiation exposure in the uranium mines. The life of Pavlína Pešková’s family was severely affected by a hereditary disease which first deprived Pavlína of her mother when she was fifteen, then of her three-month-old son Pavlíček, and finally of her adult daughter. In 1976 her daughter was the first patient with cystic fibrosis in Czechoslovakia who gave birth to a child, her only son. In 1988, Pavlína’s daughter Vladimíra succumbed to her disease at the age of 37.