Amálie Jakubovská

* 1940

  • "We didn't have television before. In the beginning, when I got married, we got a radio from my aunt in Orsava. They were in Bohemia and brought more radios. They sold us one, they called it TESLA. We didn't know how to start it or stop it, so we put it in the priza [electricity], as we say, and took it out, and that's how we ran it. People used to come to our house to listen. It's a shame to say, but that's the way it was. But there's so many TVs now ...[?] we throw them away and buy another one and they say we are bad off. It's not bad, I won't say. They don't know how it used to be. We just press the TV, lie on the bed, whatever we like. The pension arrives, it's small, but it's there. We buy what we want. So what else do I want? Some people get married and have money and money and mansions and everything I hear on TV. And he falls asin the same way the poor one does, and has nothing of it. He just takes his sins with him."

  • "As Catholics, we have always pursued our faith in the same way. Once there was a teacher from Nadlac who spoke Czech. He got married here and married a Czech girl. He told the children not to go to church. I didn't have a boy in school this time, but mothers were so sorry. You know, the priest comes and wants altar boys. And the kids were crying, afraid of their parents and teachers. My sister-in-law's boy went to church, he had to go to church. The kid went and cried, he was scared. Just then [the teacher] came out of the school and brought him back. And she let go of [the teacher] and the boy had to go to church and she scolded him. She said, 'Whatever happens, we mustn't leave the church!'"

  • "Under Ceausescu, we did not live well. Everything was withdrawn, bread was given only on food-stamps. We had to scrounge around the fields for bread. They gave us stamps as we brought the sales, we got stamps from the ladies who didn't eat. And with those stamps, we would pick up the bread that they were collecting. And after that it was a little bit better, but the people weren't happy, so they rose up and a lot of people got killes. And now there is everything. All the bread you want, all the bread in the world. They give us pensions too, but aren't the people satisfied that life is better elsewhere. So I don't know what will come of it. You know, those who haven't gone through the bad stuff, they think it should be better. But we've been through the bad, so we know it was bad. There was a lot of hunger."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Šumice, 13.09.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:21:43
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Six weeks after giving birth, we were already working in the fields

The memoirist, together with her grandchild, shortly after the death of her husband, therefore has a black scarf tied on her head to express her sadness, 1989
The memoirist, together with her grandchild, shortly after the death of her husband, therefore has a black scarf tied on her head to express her sadness, 1989
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Amálie Jakubovská (Romanian: Iacubovschi), née Veverková, was born on 29 June 1940 and grew up in the Czech village of Šumice in the Romanian Banat. As a young child, she lived through the end of the war, when she and her family took refuge in the village. Her parents owned a small farm and from childhood involved her in agricultural work. After the war, her father‘s siblings were included on the lists of re-migration transports to Czechoslovakia. However, the Amálie´s family refused to leave Šumice and continued to live there. She completed four grades in her hometown and after completing them she worked on the farm. She used to go to the market in Orsava, several dozen kilometres away. At the age of 18 she married a local musician, Jan Jakubovský, and together they raised one son. At the time of the building of Romanian socialism, they paid compulsory agricultural supplies to the state. Practically all her life Amálie worked on the farm. After the overthrow of the communists and the establishment of a pluralist system in the country, she was granted a pension from her late husband, who died in the late 1980s. With the opening of the state borders, she provided accommodation for tourists, which she ran until recently in Šumica. At the time of filming (September 2023) she was living there.