"Latvians. And they were such patriots, and they just had their poets everywhere, statues of their poets, they just didn't care what was Russian. And they, like we went to the shop to buy something, there was hardly anything to eat, I know we were like quite..., we lived in the dormitory there, but they didn't provide us with food somehow and we had to go from the shop to buy something sometimes. And when we said it in Russian, they refused to give it to us, for example. So you could see that they really didn't like the Russians."
"We found out, it was Monday night when he was arrested, and we didn't know anything." - "He had gone on a business trip?" - "He was on a business trip, or we knew he was coming on Saturday, so we didn't look for him. But on Wednesday, when I came home from school, my mother was at home, suddenly the bell rang, a really shrill one, five State Security men came in, and they said, 'Your husband has been arrested or locked up, and we're going to search the place.' Well, they turned over what they could, shaking out every book to see if there was some leaflet or some document that would incriminate him that he was doing something. They didn't find anything. And they were there for several hours and then they told my mother..." - "How did they treat you?" - "Well they were so arrogant and unpleasant, unpleasant, I was completely, I was thirteen years old, I was completely freaked out. Well, and when they finished they said, 'Mrs. Pátková, you're coming with us,' and they took her to this State Security office." - "In Opava?" - "In Opava. And I stayed there alone in the flat, not knowing when my mother would come back, if she would come back at all."
"About politics, yeah, they really talked about politics, so for example I know that our friend Emil called the Russians 'morons', I remember that. And who heard what on Free Europe or Voice of America. And so they were commenting and discussing it in different ways and my dad was, they called him 'Friday optimist' and he said from the beginning, this can't last, it can't, it has to end sometime."
Marietta Štěpánová was born on 8th December 1941 in Náchod to her mother Maria, née Vaníčková, and father Vilém Pátek. She lived through the air raids and the end of World War II in the city. After the coup in 1948, the communists took away her father‘s textile shop and the family moved to Opava. In 1955, the father was arrested and charged with treason, and later sentenced to four years for failure to report criminal activity. He spent two years in prison in Ilava before being released thanks to an amnesty. Because he was also sentenced to confiscation of property, little Marietta and her mother found themselves in financial need. After finishing her eleventh year of school, she was not allowed to study at university, so she entered the medical school in Opava and worked as a nurse in a hospital for two years. She was then allowed to study medicine and graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Prague in 1968. Half a year before that, her father died unexpectedly. She lived through the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in Opava, where she worked in the internal medicine department. In 1970, she married Jan Štěpán and together they raised two sons, Jan and Marek. She worked at the hospital in Prague-Motol in the ear, nose and throat department (ENT). Marietta Štěpán welcomed November 1989 with great joy, her older son Jan actively participated in the revolutionary events, spreading information outside Prague. In 1990, her father was rehabilitated by the courts and received financial compensation for the confiscated property. The witness worked as an ENT doctor in private practice from the 1990s until her retirement. In 2024, she was living in Mladá Boleslav.
Colonel Bohuslav Němec, cousin of the witness´s father, commander of the 1st Steamboat Squadron from the Soviet Union, airdrop in September 1941, executed on 7 May 1942 in Mauthausen, ca. 1938
Colonel Bohuslav Němec, cousin of the witness´s father, commander of the 1st Steamboat Squadron from the Soviet Union, airdrop in September 1941, executed on 7 May 1942 in Mauthausen, ca. 1938
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