Olga Holubová

* 1934

  • "We were stopped at Györ, they herded us all into the school, and there were still, I would say, miners or metallurgists, I don't know, Ostravians, a bus full of them, so they fought back quite fiercely, so the soldiers showed up. What they did with them, we don't know, they herded all of us and the kids into the school, there we had these bunk beds, the guys slept in the gym somewhere else, and we spent two, almost three days there, which was not... Well, the food was not very good, what they cooked for us in the cauldron, but especially the kids were terribly dirty, because the yard was covered with cinder, so it was a lot. Then they woke us up at 2:30 in the morning to tell us to go on."

  • "We were very hardworking in high school because the Communists said that the future intelligentsia had to learn to work. So we had thirty hectares of sugar beets, thirty hectares of potatoes. As far as the sugar beet was concerned, we were brought there in the morning, we were each put in a row, we were given short hoes, about this wide, and now we had to actually, as the grain was sown, we had to line it. There was one of their workers walking above us in a straw hat with a crease in it... 'Two centimetres here, it's not good here...' Well, that's tough. But she wasn't doing anything herself, just nagging."

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    Brno, 02.04.2019

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    duration: 01:03:31
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I really wish you were more content with what you have now

Olga Holubova
Olga Holubova
photo: archive of the witness

Olga Holubová was born on 6 May 1934 in Divišov near Benešov. She comes from a teaching and patriotic family. Towards the end of the war, they had to hide in the cellar for several days as SS troops were marching on Prague through Divišov. After the liberation of Divišov in 1945, Red Army soldiers were accommodated in the house. She graduated from the municipal school in Divišov and the grammar school in Benešov, and played amateur theatre. After graduation she joined the Regional Administration of Communications in Prague (Spojmont). On a holiday in the Krkonoše Mountains, she met her husband and moved to Brno. They have a daughter Ivana. In Brno, she worked as an administrative worker in the economic department of Elektrostroj Brno and completed several temp jobs of socialist labour. In August 1968, when Czechoslovakia was occupied by Warsaw Pact troops, she and her family returned from a holiday in Yugoslavia. They spent three days at the Hungarian border, from where customs officials refused to let them go home. Since the 1970s she has had a garden where she spends most of her time. In 2019 she lived in Brno.