Marie Polášková

* 1938

  • “Bardoň rode up along the road in front of our house, where we’re sitting right now, he had his Pioneer [motorbike]. He was tasked with founding a co-op that no one wanted to join. Václav threw some reinforcing rods in front of his motorbike. He stopped. Before that, Bardoň had phoned the factory to say that Dad would leave the factory and he’d work at the UAC, that they’d take all of their things and that everyone’d join the co-op. Of course they didn’t want to give it to them. They quarrelled. All he did was threw the six-metre-long rods in front of his motorbike. Supposedly, he fell on his handlebars and just scraped his skin. At least, that’s how Dad told me it, he didn’t have any injury, he rode away on his Pioneer by himself. And come evening the stetsecs [State Security officers - trans.] came and took them to Ostrava, and they didn’t return.”

  • “In the year 53, when my eldest brother Jan was in training as a mechanic at Tatra Kopřivnice, my parents bought a cow to be able to support everyone. Because we didn’t have any grounds, my father rented them. So that he’d have what to fee the cattle with. So when my mother went to the council office to get ration tickets, she only received ration tickets for Jan senior as a working man and for Jan junior as a worker in training, and they refused to give out ration tickets for the remaining six children and for my mother, claiming that we have fields and cattle to provide us with a living. This event practically caused my mother to break down, and I remember well - because when it my father’s pay day, we’d always go to the local grocer’s shop with my mother and a two-wheel handcart to buy food for our large family with ration tickets - how my mother cried when she parted with her last ration tickets and said that she didn’t know how we’d live on and that if she didn’t love us and there weren’t so many of us, she’d sooner just jump under the train that rode by the end of Sýkorec. My father, who was a tough man, hard-working, but also quick-tempered, went to the council office and told the local bigwigs that even Hitler had left us our ration tickets, but they’d done even after the war, and that we didn’t own any fields and we maintained our animals on rented soil. After my father’s harsh but justified tirade, the council office returned us our tickets.”

  • “They didn’t have any reason to imprison them. They didn’t know what crime to charge them with to give them a reason - that they’d refused to join the co-op and that it had been somehow violent. The prison guard started interrogating him. A young boy, not even thirty years old. He told me about it: ‘I’m not allowed to talk about it. I told it to you because I gave you half of my property and because you treat me decently and care for me.’ [The guard] began beating him, demanding he admit he and Václav wanted to kill Bardoň. Probably based on that article in the newspaper. He punched him in the face, broke his prosthetic, which cut his lip. Blood started gushing out. He fell on the ground, and [the guard] started kicking him and said: ‘You wanted to kill Bardoň, so I’ll kill you now and that’ll be it for the trial and the investigation.’ He said: ‘How could I have killed him when he rode off on his motorbike and nothing happened to him? I didn’t even touch him. I only held him by the flap of his coat and shook him and swore at him. How could I kill him when he rode off and still works in the factory?’ [The guard] probably took a fright from that, so he left him be. Then came the trial, and they charged him under section eighty. I guess they had it already prepared for Václav. So they used it for both of them, seeing that they were judged at the same trial.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Lubina, 03.09.2015

    (audio)
    délka: 02:32:57
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

They were just waiting for some excuse to scare people

Marie Polášková
Marie Polášková
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Marie Polášková, née Sochorová, was born on 20 March 1938 in the village of Sýkorec, which is now a part of the town of Kopřivnice. In 1960 she married Jaromír Polášek. She thus found her way into a family suffering heavily from Communist persecution. Her husband‘s father and brother, Alois and Václav Polášek, were sentenced to prison in 1957 for assaulting the chairman of the local united agricultural cooperative (UAC), Albín Bardoň. The punishment was meant to scare smallholders into joining the UACs. The event left its mark on all members of the family, especially when several months after returning from the correctional labour camp Bytíz, Václav Polášek‘s wife gave birth to a disabled boy, Pavel. Marie Polášková still thinks that the disability was caused by Václav Polášek‘s forced labour in the uranium mines. After the fall of Communism the witness attempted to rehabilitate her father-in-law Alois Polášek. However, the Regional Court in Ostrava repeatedly denied her request, and Marie Poláčková had to wait until 1994 to receive positive confirmation from the High Court in Prague. She claims that the delays and negative statements of the court were done with regard to the return of their confiscated property, which she remains dissatisfied with.