"When all this happened, we all received a paper that we had to sign and also state the reason why we did not try to regain membership in the Communist Party. I was in my sixth or seventh month of pregnancy at the time. My colleagues advised me to write there, that I had problems during my pregnancy and I did not want to be active in public, I denied that, thinking it was stupid and wrote that the reason was the disapproval of the entry of the Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia. By that I signed the verdict. I was expelled from the party. First months after the expulsion, they took place in the academy in such a way that all of us who were expelled, were banned from publishing. Because we had some finished articles, it was solved by having someone who passed the inspections sign it. Josef Bartoš from Olomouc, the leader of my candidate work, and some other colleagues stood up for me. I was able to publish two or three articles under a foreign name. However, continuing with my scientific work was out of the question."
"The members of the inspection commission sat in the director's office. There were, I think, three. One of them was a miner. And the head of the commission was an employee of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party, who was in charge of the Silesian Institute for several years. In 1968, he did not get into anything because he was seriously ill. And there was another member, I don't remember him. The miner greeted me with a smile and said, 'And comrade, did you love Dubcek too?' I smiled and said that as a historian I do not judge politicians by heart, but in terms of their political activity, then I was approached by a member of the regional committee, we knew each other very well, we were even on the first name terms. He smiled at me and said: 'Nina, we know each other, you have always been such a loyal person. if you tell us who was the initiator of all those resolutions and events during the spring of 1968, I guarantee you that you will get out of it without any problems.' I looked at him and said very drily,' Zdeněk, thank you so much for such help.' And I turned on my heel and slammed the door behind me. That´s how my inspections ended."
"Another of my bad experiences from Lipov was related to collectivization. As young teachers, we had a duty to participate in persuading the peasants to join the collective farm. Not that we should persuade them, but we had to sit there to witness the process. The workers of the surrounding factories and the comrades of the district committee treated the simple peasants in a terrible way. It was the first huge blow to my idealistic conception of communist ideology and the system. It influenced me a lot. Another one had been invited to be persuaded, and it was not heard whether he had knocked or not. He crumpled his hat in his hands and barely opened the door. Someone shouted at him, 'Out! Can't you say hello?' It was happening right at school; they were sitting at the table on the stage and they were really mean. It affected me very badly. I was in my twenties and it was probably the first time in my life that I started to think about what I saw around me."
"I ate breakfast, I sat on a high chair at the table. My father was washing in the sink next to me, maybe even shaving. Suddenly, there was a huge blow. There was a window behind me, and a flame could be seen bursting through the gardens. My father saw through the window that a peasant mill had been hit. And one of the pieces of the mine flew a little over half a meter above my head and stabbed the wooden door opposite. My father stayed still like a pillar; my mother ran around the house somewhere. I started screaming because I was terrified. We were in our potato cellar within half an hour. That was our luck. We moved to the cellar at 9 o´clock, at eleven o´clock our house got a direct hit. "
Nina Pavelčíková, neé Prokešová, was born on April 1, 1939 in Zlín. She grew up in the family of a veterinarian in Veselí nad Moravou in South Moravia. The mother Frida, née Reiner, was of Jewish descent, and while many of her relatives were victims of the Holocaust, the witness‘s mother was protected by her marriage to an „Aryan“ husband. Nina graduated from a higher pedagogical school in Opava, then studied history and Russian by distance learning at the University of Brno. She joined the Communist Party. She taught at elementary school, then worked as a historian. In 1966 she joined the Silesian Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Opava. In 1968, it supported the revivalist process and in August she joined the protests against the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. She was expelled from the Communist Party for this, she was not allowed to publish and work in the field. Until the fall of totalitarianism, she worked as a clerk in Opava‘s Sigma and in a housing cooperative. She was justified at work and returned to the Silesian Institute. In 1995, she began teaching history at the University of Ostrava, where she later obtained a professorship. She is one of sought-after experts on the history of the second half of the 20th century.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
