Věra Včeláková

* 1938

  • "I was arranging a job in a military hospital. I had everything prepared, it was pretty much certain, and everything was ready. When I came there on the first day, which was May 2 after the Labour Day, they suddenly started saying I couldn't actually be hired and so on. I wondered why since I had all the bases covered. The head nurse wouldn't tell me but then she said, 'It's not in my power, but I've been instructed not to hire you.' I came home crying and called my husband to work and told him what happened. He then said, 'I'm going to take a friend who's the chairman of ROH with me and see about it because you've got the right to know the reason.' They went there and came to the cadre section (HR) which was everywhere and omnipotent. The HR person finally said that they found out that my mother was born in America, and that was the main reason."

  • "Sometime towards the end of elementary school, maybe, I don't know, I started to notice from my surroundings that people were saying this and swearing at that. But we didn't have any private business or property to lose, so it didn't hit us directly, so to speak." - "Your father worked in the civil service; did anything change for him after the coup?" - "I don't think so. He was very ill later on, with severe asthma, and retired in... I don't know the year. I don't really recall how much he perceived any changes after '48. It wasn't discussed at home, probably for 'tactical' reasons or because us kids didn't understand it anyway."

  • "I remember when the Russians came to Prague during the uprising... My dad was on the barricades in Prague during the uprising, as I learned later on. My mother, sister and I were living in a rented house, and when the Russians came and drove through Úvaly, we plucked lilacs in bloom and welcomed the Russians with lilac twigs."

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    Praha, 29.11.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:19:52
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In healthcare, you get dumbed down over time

Věra Včeláková, 1959
Věra Včeláková, 1959
zdroj: Witness's archive

Věra Včeláková, née Bílková, was born in Prešov, Slovakia on 11 December 1938 to Maria Bílková and Jan Bílek, a mixed Slovak-Czech couple. In 1939 the family moved to Úvaly near Prague where Věra Včeláková witnessed the Prague Uprising and the liberation. She graduated from the secondary medical school in Belgická Street in Prague. After graduation, she joined the Bulovka Hospital as a nurse in the gynaecological and obstetric department. She and her husband Jiří Včelák raised two sons. She joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) in the 1970s. During the normalisation period she and her family went to the West several times. She worked in the health sector all her life. In March 1991, doctors diagnosed her son Roman with leukaemia, to which he succumbed in 1992. One of the first post-1989 public fundraisers was organised for her son‘s treatment. Věra Včeláková and her husband contributed to the establishment of the bone marrow donor registry. She was active in the HAIMA association which supported children with oncological and haemato-oncological diseases and their families. She lived in Prague in 2022.