Eva Potůčková

* 1927

  • I just happened to pass the college background checks. And that's because we had been waiting for the background checks on the Small Side since the afternoon and I didn't get my turn until five in the morning when everyone was fed up. We waited there all night. That was the interviews. I was tutoring my mother's friend's daughter at the time. They asked me about my family situation. I said the mother was a widow and I was tutoring. It didn't come up at all that I was the daughter of a millionaire, and I passed the background checks. So I was able to finish school."

  • "I had been dating my husband for two years, he was studying architecture, just about to graduate. My grandmother was living below us and there was a caretaker in the house at that time, which caused my husband to find himself in the PTP (Auxiliary Technical Battalions). He had lifelong medical consequences due to that. The caretaker pressured my grandmother and her apartment as to why she was living there alone when she could live with her daughter, so my husband and I got married a year earlier than we wanted to because of the apartment. I got married in 1949."-"How did the caretaker cause him to have to join the PTP?"-"When he came to the army, they called him and he foolishly thought they wanted him to go to officer's school. They wanted to talk to him and the first question was how many tenants my mother had in her house. He was stumped because he had no idea. He didn't care about my mother's house. So that's probably why he ended up in the PTP. Three whole years in the mines in Zbuch. I felt guilty towards him for the rest of my life that he had to join the PTP because of me."

  • "...Then when I was looking for a job, my papers said I was from a bourgeois family. They wouldn't accept me anywhere. Then, by chance, my mother met her friend from Sokol, Sister Mala. She was the inspector of the co-op. In Holešovice there was a so-called Legion of Little Ones. It was a beautiful, large wooden building with a garden, a swimming pool, founded by Alice Masaryk for working-class children and so-called “social cases”. It housed a daycare centre that belonged to Masaryk's school. It had four departments. Mrs. Malá said that it would be good to make a study room in the kindergarten, so that the children would not have to do their homework where they played. And I could go to the study room. So I went to the study hall, but I had to have a certificate from the National Committee. There was Franta Malý, also from Sokol, who knew my parents very well. He wrote that although I was from a bourgeois family, I was allowed to enter the school. Nobody was going to the school anyway. And so I joined the cooperative."

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    Praha, 06.03.2023

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I had a guilty conscience towards my husband that he had to go to PTP because of me

Eva Potůčková, 40s after the war
Eva Potůčková, 40s after the war
zdroj: pamětnice

Eva Potůčková, nee. Zimolová was born on 9 May 1927 in Prague into the family of Jan Zima, a technical clerk in a gasworks, and Karla, née Štorkánová. Her parents were Sokol officials. The Potůčeks lived in an apartment house in Prague Holešovice, which was built in 1906 by their grandfather František Štorkán, an investor and businessman at the time. During the war, Eva‘s uncle Otto Frömpter, a Sokol official who collaborated with the anti-Nazi resistance group Jindra, was executed. In the spring of 1945, Eva‘s father died after spinal surgery. Eva had been in the Sokol since she was four years old and after the war, when the Sokol was re-established, she joined it again, already as a pupil leader and vice-principal. Eva graduated from high school and in 1946 she entered the University of Political and Social Sciences because she was interested in social work. During her studies, however, the Communists abolished the social studies course, and when she left the school in 1950, it was called the College of Political and Economic Sciences. Thereafter, because of her bourgeois background, she found it difficult to find employment. Thanks to a friend from Sokol, she was able to work as a social worker, then she completed her pedagogical minimum and taught at primary and secondary school. For the longest time she worked at the clothing factory in Prague, where she taught economics. In the 1950s, the Communists took two tenement houses from the family, and the house mistress put pressure on the Potůček family to vacate one apartment in the house. Eva Potůčková‘s husband was probably also sent to the mines for three years instead of the regular army to join the PTP (auxiliary technical battalions). After November 1989, the houses were returned to the family in restitution, and Eva returned to the restored Sokol as head of the pupils.