Věra Burešová

* 1924

  • “Dad had a good reputation at work, and so after the war, when the banks and the Sudetes opened again, he was given the offer to choose if he wanted to go to Jablonec, Teplice, and so on. That he should choose where he wanted to work as manager and establish [a new branch of] Legiobanka. He came back in the evening, from Teplice I think, and I heard him tell Mum that he couldn’t work as manager. That he’d rather work as an ordinary clerk. They had taken him down under the bank. There were piles of jewels and money on the tables, looted. They had stayed in the Sudetes after the Germans and Czechs that had been deported. And he didn’t want to have anything to do with that. So he went to the central office of Legiobanka - later Živnobanka - in Poříčí in Prague. He worked at the desk there. A friend of Mum’s expressed surprise that Dad had been a manager and was now employed as an ordinary clerk. Mum said that he might be just an ordinary clerk now, but he maintained his convictions. Because some people rushed straight to the Sudetes for the loot.”

  • “After graduation, Karel Eisert suddenly came up and asked me to make a first aid kit. There wasn’t much to work with back then. Some powder for wounds, peroxide, boric acid, but he mainly needed bandages, cotton wool, and plasters. So I prepared it for him and he came to pick it up. Then he visited us and begged me not to tell anyone about it. My dad already knew what it was about, and he also stressed that I shouldn’t tell anyone about the first aid kit. If the Gestapo caught word of it, they’d murder both families. Who was the kit for? A group of partisans had been airdropped near Louny. They had a doctor with them, a Russian lady, and their commander was Lieutenant Vasil Kish from Carpathian Ruthenia. They were deployed near Louny by mistake. I don’t know exactly, whether Chrudim or Čáslav. So they were in completely foreign territory with no idea where they were. But the gamekeepers, Czechs, found them out of course. They knew Mr Eisert, the wholesaler, and they told him about it. He took them food, and he also needed a first aid kit for them because they were beaten up.”

  • “They came in March - the German inspector - they took all the boys and assigned them to work in the North Bohemian Coal Mines. The boys didn’t graduate. Two eighth-year classes of the Louny grammar school. Each class was left with some fourteen fifteen girls. [Q: You were in the year born in 1924, which was sent to forced labour.] Yes, but we graduated normally. Whereas the boys didn’t. They took them away in their final year and sent them to the mines. They liked the thin ones the most because the lignite mines only had a ladder leading down. There weren’t any technical amenities yet. So they were in the mines, with accommodation in a pub somewhere. The boys said they were given a piece of hard bread and some watery milk.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 04.12.2017

    (audio)
    délka: 04:35:49
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

A pharmacist who saved and risked lives

Věra Burešová 1945
Věra Burešová 1945
zdroj: archiv Pamětníka

Věra Burešová, née Mušková, was born on 5 February 1924 in Louny. Her father Karel Muška moved the family to eastern Slovakia in 1930 - he worked as a bank manager in Michalovce and then Zvolen. The witness and her sister Hana attended Slovak schools. During the mobilisation in September 1938 and the subsequent establishment of an autonomous Slovak government, her father moved the family to her grandmother‘s house in Lochenice near Hradec Králové, where Věra continued her grammar school studies. After her father‘s definite return from Slovakia in 1940, the Muškas moved back to Louny. Her mother suffered from fears of anti-Jewish repression the whole war long because she did not inform the authorities of her half-Jewish origin. In May 1943 the witness graduated from the Louny grammar school; her male classmates had been sent off to forced labour in the North Bohemian Coal Mines before they could complete the school. Věra avoided forced labour because she went into training as a pharmacist at the local pharmacy. In 1944 she was asked to prepare first aid kits for partisans wanted by the Gestapo - the resistance group had been deployed near Louny under the command of Vasil Kish. The witness remembers the Louny hero Karel Eisert, who helped the partisans and also supported the families of men arrested or killed by the Gestapo throughout the war. In 1948 Věra Burešová graduated from pharmacy at the Faculty of Natural Sciences. She worked as a pharmacist; in the years 1983-1993 she headed the pharmacy at Vinohrady Hospital. She travelled and stayed abroad twice with her husband, a salesman for Czechoslovak businesses, in Belgium in 1960 and 1961 and in Greece in 1968 and 1969. She raised two children.