“In the morning I walked to my work. I don’t think there was any public transport – no there was from our place. I took a walk from the Dělostřelecká street to Perlová street across the Old Town Square. And there were the large military vehicles and tanks and everything. And people around them. They talked to the Russians, explaining that there was no revolution here. Who could speak Russian, joined in. We tried to explain calmly that there had been a mistake, that there was no revolution. I remember arriving in my office with an hour’s delay, since we spoke to them. I couldn’t speak Russian. We started learning at the end of the war since we thought we would make some contacts with them. So I learned but I couldn’t speak much.”
“My parents were members. I was too, since I was five. I had to go every time. It would have been a great punishment for me if I had been prevented from going. My father had a function in Sokol’s administration, my mum was a leader of child groups. It was very nice. We had a new gym and a pitch. It was there that we spent all of our time. It was beautiful, really. In the small town the Sokol was a huge organisation that gathered children from all around.”
“It was a part of education that I attended piano classes from about six or seven. I did that for four, maybe five years. I didn’t like the exercise. I liked to play hits but my teacher was quite strict. And when I went to school in Pardubice, there was not much time so I quitted. I returned to piano only after my secondary school graduation when I was on forced labour in Dvůr Králové. There I stayed with a family which had a piano and I took lessons from some professor. I learned a lot there. I used to accompany the young ones at all the parties and Sokol academies. I played a lot. And rather well. I considered studying musing but I wasn’t that good.”
„No graduation celebreation was meant to happen and my father, we had a caffee and a restaurant in Sezemice near Pardubice, and daddy was warned, that if he wanted to do it, of course the boys wanted to organise it in our restaurant and they´d shut it up. So my brother was attending a hotel school in Vary and simply helped organise it. We moved out one room upstairs in the flat and gave the restaurant chairs in there so that the twenty eight or thirty people who graduated could celebrate in there. So my mother cook the food and we celebrated and the boys slept in the chairs. They went in the morning as the bus from Sezemice went twice a week. My parents gave them breakfast. Everyone was remembering the feast and we kept meeting until we were all eighty.“
Olga Stavová, née Bachtíková and married Bernklauová, was born on 5 April 1924 in Sezemice near Pardubice to husbands Bachtík. Her parents were self-employed and sent their daughter to study business academy in Pardubice. After graduation she was forced to labour go with other contemporaries. She was lucky and due to her qualification got a job in an office of a branch of an airway company Junkers in Dvův Králové. After was she moved to Prague, where she worked in Závod léčebné mechaniky. There she met an administrator of a Swedish company Josef Bernklau, who delivered steel for injection needles. In 1949 they married and soon after their son was born. For his participation in war in Svoboda´s army he was a part of the processes, a victim of which was also Tomáš Sedláček. Josef Bernklau was amongst the luckier ones; after a number of interrogations he was set free. Yet a few years later he ended up in prison anyway; in 1957 he was sentenced for „treasonous“ anecdote for seven months that he served in Pankrác. In 1959 he died and a witness married his co-fighter and a friend Zdeněk Stav. The marriage did not last long; after four years Zdeněk Stav died of cancer. Olga Stavová would still meet the families of war veterans within the Czechoslovak Legionaries, but due to her age she cannot take part in social life as much as she did before.
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!
