Vlasta Pytlíková

* 1932

  • “I and my mother sewed the American flag. Together with my sister, we cut out forty-eight stars and my mother sewed them on the flag together with the stripes. Then, she took some bed linen, dyed it red and we sewed a Soviet flag with the hammer and the sickle. We were living with the Halešova family, today it is Tyršova Street and we hung the flags out of the windows. As the Germans were retreating to Brdy, one neighbor, Mr. Drahoňovský, said: ‘the krauts don’t know where to go, so they’re marching’. One German stopped and wanted to shoot Mr. Drahoňovský. He must have understood what he had said in Czech. But the others - when they saw our flags - said that the Americans were already there and they kept marching. There’s a road leading through Dražkovice that connects on to the main road leading to Nové MItrovice. The American troops clashed there with the Germans. There was even a burning Jeep. We went there to take a look.”

  • “In 1938, there came the mobilization. My father was in the civil service as a gendarme constable and thus he had to leave for the service. My mother stayed at home in Subcarpathian Ruthenia with three children to take care of. They dispatched a train for women with children but the journey took a very long time because the Slovak State had by then been already established as an independent Republic and they would not let us cross the border. Thus the train went through Romania, Hungary and Austria to České Budějovice, from where we got to Plzeň. My mother was originally from Plzeň and her parents lived there, so we went to them.”

  • “At that time, I worked as a nurse and I went to the square in the afternoon to see what was happening there. I stood in front of the town hall and I said such a sentence, facing the soldiers who stood in front of us with rifles and bayonets. I said: ‘that’s nice, you swore that’d go with the working people and now you’re standing against the working people’. After I said this, a policeman came and arrested me.”

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    Plzeň, 05.06.2013

    (audio)
    délka: 02:28:08
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Liberation of Western Bohemia by the U.S. Army in 1945
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Arrested for one sentence

Photo from the investigation file of the secret state police (StB)
Photo from the investigation file of the secret state police (StB)
zdroj: ABS, spis V-835 Pl

Vlasta Pytlíková, née Davidovičová, was born in 1932 in Berehovo in Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Her father, Ladislav Davidovič, was a gendarme in Veliká Kopaň where the family lived. In September 1938, he was mobilized and he joined a unit of the State-Defense Guard, serving six months as a border guard. In March 1939, after the occupation of Subcarpathian Ruthenia by Hungary, Vlasta, her mother and her siblings left Ruthenia. However, the train was not allowed to cross the territory of the newly established, so-called Slovak State, and thus it had to go via Romania, Yugoslavia and Austria, before it finally arrived in České Budějovice. The family found a refuge at the parents of the mother in Plzeň. The father of Vlasta was transferred to the police station in Spálené Poříčí, where the family spent the war. After the end of the war, Vlasta graduated from secondary school and took a medical course to become a nurse at the cervical department of the University Hospital in Plzeň. On June 1, 1953, she was arrested for participating in the demonstrations against the currency reform. Her brother and sister were arrested as well. She was sentenced to six months in prison and served her term in a prison in Rakovník. During her term in prison, she worked in a ceramic pottery factory. Her father was dismissed at an hour’s notice from the police corps in June 1953 and her parents were evicted from their house in Litice and moved to Chudenice. After she had returned from prison, Vlasta was unable to find a job in Plzeň and had to move to Marianské Lázně, where she worked as a nurse in a medical facility. In 1966, she returned to Plzeň together with her husband and children, changed her profession and subsequently worked as a shop assistant. She retired in 1987. She’s an active member of the Confederation of Political Prisoners in Plzeň.