Medarda Pustajová

* 1954

  • "He didn't want to talk about the bad things that happened. All he said was that if he had known what was in store for him in those 16 years... When he started in 1948 with what according to them was criminal activity, but as he said, if we want to maintain a democratic state, that it cannot be considered criminal activity. But they classified it that way. In 'forty-eight he was only seventeen years old, so he wasn't of age, and instead of the death penalty he got 'only' twenty-five years. And he said that if he had known what he would have to endure, he would have chosen the death penalty instead, that it would have been more merciful. But he didn't want to elaborate too much. I asked him every now and then, because his mouth was a little crooked, and he said that at that time he didn't even know if he would be able to talk ever again. That the guard had beaten him so badly that they had to do a resection in his molars and stitch his mouth. He said something here and there, but he didn't want to talk about it much."

  • "Before he was arrested, he was teaching double-entry bookkeeping somewhere in the Tatras, there was a youth school there and he was the head of the youth course. He said that one day they came to tell him that he had a phone call, but when he came to the office they said it wasn't working and he had to go to the post office. So he just ran to the post office lightly dressed in his shirt and slippers and he used to say that he came back from the post office sixteen years and three days later. Because on the way through the woods, two men in overcoats came towards him, and each of them put a handcuff on one of his hands, they covered his eyes, and took him to the court in Ruzyně, where they ordered them what to say at the court. But he said that in that court he was only answering yes or no anyway. He refused to testify the things they dictated to him. And he also said that he was not angry at those close to him, accomplices, who said something else. He wasn't worried because he had nothing to lose, but the others had families, so he fully understood that they were expressing themselves differently."

  • "All those people who were imprisoned with him were released [amnesty] in 1960, but the amnesties didn’t apply to him. Then President Novotný wanted to grant him a pardon, but he refused it. He sent a letter to the court, for one thing, that pardons are granted to criminals and he was not a criminal; and for another, that he did not vote for him to become president, so he was not his president and he did not want a pardon from him; also that he had renamed the Czechoslovak Republic the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic; and lastly, that he would be released on parole, so he did not want that in any case. So then they moved him to Valdice for three years."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Olomouc, 19.03.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:30:59
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

My husband got 25 years instead of the death penalty. However, he said that the death penalty would have been more merciful

Medarda Pustajová in 1978
Medarda Pustajová in 1978
zdroj: Contemporary witness's archive

Medarda Pustajová, née Jandurová, was born on April 15, 1954 in Lúčky, Slovakia, near Rožmberk. She grew up in the neighboring village of Madočany. She had four siblings. Her mother, Alžběta Jandurová, originally a clerk, took care of the children and the household, while her father, Josef Jandura, worked in a tyre repair factory. At the beginning of the 1970s, during her studies at secondary school, Medarda met her future husband Dobroslav Pustaj. After the February 1948 coup, he co-founded and subsequently organized the Slobodné Československo resistance group (Free Czechoslovakia). In 1952, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, of which he served 16. He was imprisoned in the concentration camp surrounding the uranium mines in Jáchymov, Leopoldov and Valdice. After his release in 1968, he had to work in the Dúbravské mines because of his past which was inconvenient to the regime and he was kept under surveillance by the State Security Service (StB) until the Velvet Revolution. Medarda Jandurová married Dobroslav Pustaj in 1987 and together they raised their daughter Dobroslava. In the first half of the 1990s, the family moved from Slovakia to the Olomouc region, where Medarda lived until 2023. Dobroslav Pustaj died in 2013. In 2017, he was awarded the state decoration of the Order of Ľudovít Štúr II Class in memoriam for his outstanding contribution to democracy and the protection of human rights and freedoms.