Hedvika Šišková

* 1932

  • "It was a terrible surprise, because we could not imagine that they would liquidate these small shops. So when those officials turned up, it was a big surprise. And they did an inventory check themselves right away, so there was no way my parents could take anything because it was theirs. So we lost everything and nothing was refunded at all, no, they did not give anything..."

  • "This Robert used to come and he always had a full bag, kind of a one-click-open-bag with one handle, and he would sit in our kitchen and talk to my mother or father. And once my mother said, 'I don't know what he's carrying in that bag, I went to the cupboard, and I wanted to open the door and he said: Oops, look out! And he took the bag and put it on the other side.' And after the war he said, 'Yeah, Hedvika, if you'd have knocked it hard enough, something might have exploded.' So he had it full of grenades, he was in contact with the partisans."

  • "I didn't like parades or May Day celebrations or lantern parades, liberation anniversaries, that sort of thing, not at all, not at all. I would not even send my kids there, no, never... And what was it like in the city? Well, of course, when I was already employed, I was obliged to participate on May Day as a nurse. It was cold, it rained sometimes, and we were only lightly dressed... The main thing was that we turned up, that the health care system agreed with socialism, that's how it was, it was being registered. We had to come to work and sign in, like we were going to work, and we went in the parade. So they kept track of all the people..."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Holešov, 01.06.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:15:50
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Zlín, 24.11.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:16:35
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Mum let me go as if nothing was going on

Hedvika Šišková, undated
Hedvika Šišková, undated
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Hedvika Šišková, née Pešáková, was born on 1 September 1932 in Prusinovice in the Holešov region, where her parents Robert and Hedvika also came from. Her father trained as a merchant in Holešov and fought in the World War I. He and his wife then ran a shop in Prusinovice. During the period following the assassination of Heydrich, several members of her mother‘s family were imprisoned. During the period of liquidation of trades, the Pešák family lost their business - her mother ran a milk collection centre for a while, and her father became a clerk of the State Bank of Czechoslovakia in Holešov and in Gottwaldov (Zlín). In 1948, the witness attended the XIth Sokol Meeting in Prague. Because of her father being a tradesman, Hedvika was not allowed to study, so she started to work after completing the town (upper primary) school and one-year apprenticeship course (JUK). She worked in the hosiery factories in what was then Gottwaldov, later as a clerk and finally in the health care - at the age of thirty-six she completed her evening studies at the medical school. She worked, among other things, as head nurse at the dentistry department of the Health Centre in Holešov and at the Psychiatric Hospital in Kroměříž. She and her husband got married in 1952 and raised three children. In 2022 she was living in Holešov.