“Well, when it happened, I remember that students immediately set off to other parts of the republic and apparently some of them from Písek… I didn’t know them myself… These ‘apostles’, bringing news of what had been happening in Prague, came to Písek to support it here. And I was waiting curiously to see what would happen at the agricultural school. Well, the principal received them and he didn’t send them packing, surprisingly, maybe because he knew something more or realized… And they spent some time in his office. And the moment they left… I was just teaching a class… the school radio announced that all members of the Communist Party should report to the principal. And I saw all these students fixing their eyes on me, waiting to see whether I would also go to the principal’s office. Coincidentally, it was my own class which they had finally let me have as a class teacher. Because for a long time I had been some kind of a subversive to them. So I saw in these kids’ eyes – and I knew that many of their parents were communists – yet still… They were just waiting to see whether I would go. I didn’t.”
“We watched the TV daily, watching how the Soviet and their allied armies, but mainly the Russians, how they crisscrossed Eastern Slovakia and were still not about to leave the republic. But there they already anticipated that they would occupy us. And my sister wanted me to stay there. She said she would get me a job, that I shouldn’t be worried, but I didn’t agree to it for two reasons. First, it was before my final exams and I had had all my classes finished. And my parents suffered heavily that my sister Marie had married to Algeria and since 1949 they hadn’t seen her until the 1960s. I remember still being in bed one morning, when my mother came and said: ‘They’re occupying us.’ And said: ‘Come listen to the radio.’ So I got up real quick and we listened to the radio together with my father in the kitchen. And I remember she then said: ‘Listen, this doesn’t look good, we’ve experienced this with the Germans already. Please, here is some money, go shopping.’ I know she wanted me to buy some flour and some butter, for starters. So I… the queues had been long at that point already. And on August 21, I was studying in the garden, listening to the radio I had with me. And from the radio I learned that they were coming from Aš, that it was in our area. I heard them break the fence and a moment later you could hear the tanks.”
“When things got tough, when the metro was closed between East and West Berlin and then when the wall was built and you could see there, across Studánka… I walked to school, for example, and saw families or people walking there and in a little while there was whistling and roaring and the border guards were there, and they took them away. They used to have this wrong impression that it would be easier to get to West Germany via the Aš Hook, or the republic. And as I said before, there were many incidents of people trying to cross the border. But usually I only learned about it later, or it ended up in different ways. But once, it was a Sunday morning, I went to Studánka and saw an extended order of soldiers and heard shouting, commands, because I had lived up above there… It was spring, not summer quite yet as it was not the summer holiday but sometime before that. So, my windows were open and then there was massive gunfire. And the following day I learned that a sixteen-year-old boy from Hranice who had tried to cross the border had been shot. I don’t know what got into his head. He must have known it there, how it worked; I don’t know. Of course, people tried to escape there. The wires were usually far away from the actual border. When it was in the forest, then the longer it was, the route to the actual border. When there was a field or a meadow behind, it was closer. But if it was a field, someone had to farm it. So, screened people, usually from Hranice, were let there, to do the necessary work and come back again. And I would say that I know about maybe two or three cases when they didn’t come back. They just waved at them and walked off.”
We heard from the school radio that all members of the Communist Party should report to the principal. My students fixed their eyes on me, waiting to see whether I was going or not. I didn’t go
Anna Vinterová, née Pešková, was born May 13, 1943 in Klatovy. She comes from a middle-class Catholic family, adherents of Masaryk. She spent her childhood and adolescence in Františkovy Lázně, a city her parents left in 1937 due to the worsening relations between the Germans and the Czechs, and to which they again returned shortly after the war. She graduated from a secondary pedagogical school and started teaching children in the villages in the so-called Aš Hook – the frontier region that has struggled with problems caused by the displacement of German population long after the war. The composition of students in the classes she had taught at the beginning of her career reflected the composition of the region’s population back then. It was Czech kids, kids of the non-displaced Germans and children of re-migrants from Hungary and Romania. After February 1948 she witnessed the changes brought to the borderlands by the Communist coup d’état. This mainly included the closed borders and related increase in illegal border-crossing attempts. Life of her close family was also affected by the collectivization of the early 1950s to a large extent. Her husband’s uncle Emilian Winter spent fourteen years in a work and educational camp in the Jáchymov uranium mines. He was sentenced after refusing to join a collective farm and influencing other village inhabitants by his attitude. In 1978 Anna moved to Písek with her family where she continued to teach, first at a primary school and later at an agricultural high school. That’s where she experienced the Velvet Revolution, during which she got engaged in the Civic Forum in Písek. Afterwards, she joined the Civic Democratic Party and was the president of its branch in Písek. At the same time, she was elected to the Písek City Council, worked in the School board and was a deputy mayor in Písek for one term. She was the principal of Písek Gymnasium for eight years. During her teaching career, she influenced hundreds of her pupils and students by her opinions and outlook on life.
