Dana Zemanová

* 1930

  • "Today, even murderers will not be deprived of the right to vote; back then my Dad was not allowed to vote. As I was looking forward to my first election, I was eighteen in January and there were elections in May, as I was looking forward to the election! And then we were moved to Strážnice, first to Střednice, we were actually from Střednice, and we went to the voting cards. Dad stayed home and the three of us, mom, brother, I had the right to vote, so we went with those voting cards. And now, as the queue was terrible long, the people parted, and those people didn't know why, because it was my father's home village, the Strážnice, that is why it happened. And they parted and now whispered who we were. A cousin ran up to the middle of the village and said, 'You have to vote in public, if there was only one black ticket, it would be up to you.' You have to vote publicly. 'So we had to vote publicly so that the whole village could see that we did not put the black ticket there. Those were my first choices.”

  • "When I came to that school, it was still a preparatory week, so I went with a child, maybe to the locker room. On the stairs - the schools were not locked at the time – there was a soldier with a rifle, a Soviet soldier with a rifle and a bayonet. So I'm asking in Russian what's going on, and he replied that he was going to arrest Mrs. Polednova. I said: 'And who told you that, why are you doing that?' The children complained that she was strict. And I whispered to the child, 'Run for the director.' So I kept talking to the Russian and I didn't let him go, he was standing under the stairs, I was on the stairs. The headmaster came, and he told him again that he was going to arrest Mrs. Polednová. And the director told him quite loudly: 'As long as I'm the director, only our police have the right to arrest here, and get out!' He threw the Russian out."

  • "As it started with the mobilization, [the soldiers] came to us for tomato soup because their kitchen was delayed and they only ate cold food for three days. So my mother cooked an eight-liter pot, we had a full garden of tomatoes and we didn't eat them, so we ate the soup. My mother cooked an eight-liter pot and the soldiers took turns in our kitchen and listened to the radio, which at that time was just a huge rarity. It was a mobilization in the year 1938, so they listened to Munich as well. And the one soldier was sitting on a small stool sitting by the stove when we put more wood in, and he had my little sister on his lap, saying, 'I have such a small child at home, I would go to fight right away.' Because they wanted to fight. Munich was quite a terrible thing. And then the soldiers left immediately, they had to disarm them immediately, the soldiers left… No, they had to return to the barracks, they did not disarm until the fifteenth of March. And immediately there the Germans arrived, fleeing the border in front of Munich from Hitler, but they gave them guarantees that nothing would happen to them, so the Czechs returned, the ones, who had to leave everything on the border. And they moved inland, and simply a family of five lived in one room. There were then two families in that class upstairs, the classroom closed the closet, and one family of four lived in one half and the other family of four lived in the other half."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Odolena Voda, 05.11.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:31:13
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

To work, to work, to work even more and to be honest

Dana Zemanová (before marriage)
Dana Zemanová (before marriage)
zdroj: Archiv pamětnice

Dana Zemanová, née Slánská, was born on January 7, 1930 in Dolní Zimoř in the Kokořín region as the second of four children. The father worked as a teacher at the local school where the family also lived. In 1937 they moved to Taurus, where the witness started studying in the second grade. After a general mobilization in 1938, soldiers were housed in the school for several days. After them, the Germans first arrived from the border, and soon after came the evicted Czechs. During the war, she attended a burgher school, but it was closed for the last year of the war. The witness recalls how joyfully they greeted Soviet soldiers and threw lilacs at their tanks. Only a moment later, she witnessed the bombing of Mělník. After the war, the family moved to Želíz, where the father worked as a manager at a local two-class school and as an administrative commissioner at the same time. Dana Zemanová studied a two-year vocational school for women in Mělník, and from 1947 a one-year higher vocational school in Mladá Boleslav. After the communist coup, his father was fired and deprived of the right to vote as a National Socialist who refused to join the Communist Party. In the 1950s, the witness passed successful exams at the Faculty of Education of Charles University, and while still studying she was placed in Jílové near Děčín. After the wedding, she and her husband moved to Odolena Voda, and two daughters were born to her. From 1960 until her retirement in 1985, she worked as local primary school teacher. In August 1968, she and her daughter were on holiday in the Giant Mountains, from which they could not return home for several days. When she then took the train to the spa in Slovakia for her second daughter, they witnessed the shooting of Warsaw Pact soldiers at civilians in the square. In November 1989, she enthusiastically welcomed the regime change and collected anti-communist posters pasted around Prague at the time. After the revolution, she began touring and underwent several sightseeing tours in Europe. In 2021 she lived in Odolena Voda.