Anna Plesníková

* 1937

  • "I've been here in the store for almost nine years in textiles, downs there, it's closed down already. And so it happened in the summer that there were cars driving and there were Russians in them, but the wealthy ones, the officers and their wives, it was summer, and she had a fur coat for example, so furry. And now they came to the store and wanted something from me. I turned my back on them, I turned back to them all, for everything they said, I said I didn't have or I didn't understand, but I understood well because I was learning Russian.

  • "But I have one more memory, and it's pretty ugly. When we arrived in Velemín, we had some furniture on the car and we just were, so we left the house which we had, which we had assigned actually, so we should have gone there, and they were going out, the Germans who lived here and were displaced. They just left such an old grandmother there. And I remember that German woman, the young woman, the housewife, turned around. We stood there waiting for them to leave. So, we as children didn't understand it very much, I even felt sorry for them, because each one of them only had a backpack and they just had small children too… Well… And she cursed us. We didn't know what she was saying, she said it in German. When they left, we asked our neighbor, she heard it all, the Mrs. Kučerová, she knew German, and so she told us that she cursed us, I don't know how many generations. And I have just been living with this idea of the curse for eighty-two years, not eighty-two years, it happened in the forty-five, but when something happens in the family, some misfortune, I think it's because she cursed us."

  • "He was simply forced. One day those people came for him, I don't know, they were probably undercover, they had long coats like that, and they took him and we didn't know about him for three days, we didn't even know how he was and where he was taken. And when they brought him in, he wasn't our dad anymore, he was such a devastated man, and he just came in to the apartment, to the kitchen, and said, 'Mom, we have to give it to them. 'They just forced him.'

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    Velemín, 12.02.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 26:59
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

That curse is in me my whole life

Anna Plesníková
Anna Plesníková
zdroj: archive of the witness

Anna Plesníková, née Koubová, was born on September 8, 1937 in Brozany nad Ohří. She had four siblings, her father worked as a carpenter and her mother was a housewife, later she worked in the United Agricultural Cooperative (JZD) in Velemín. During the war, her father was employed in a sugar factory in Doksany and was later assigned to work in Terezín, where he secretly distributed his snacks to prisoners. Anna experienced warnings during Allied air raids on the surrounding towns and the liberation of Brozany by the Red Army. After the war, the Koubs moved to Velemín, where they were assigned a house after the expulsion of Germans and a German grandmother, whom their mother then took care of. Shortly after 1948, the Communists confiscated the family‘s land and forced them to join the collective farm. Anna graduated from a primary school in Brozany and Velemín. When she was twelve, she sprained her ankle and got tuberculosis of the bones in her injured leg. She had cast a on her leg for several years and was not cured until the hospital in Volyn. She worked for a year in the Coal Warehouses in Lovosice and later in the textile shop in Velemín for nine years. She recalls the occupation of the republic by the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. In September of the same year, the Russians shot her brother-in-law, Ondrej Oprendek, in Velemín. Anna Plesníková has two children and lives in Velemín.