"Because we lived on the side of the road, someone was always coming and knocking, so one officer got there and wanted to live there. But father took him into the room and showed him that there were too many of us because there was my grandfather, my grandmother and a great-grandmother, and two children. And my parents had a cupboard there with some parades [jewelry]."-"And this was a Russian officer?" - "It was a Russian officer, he wanted to live there, so my dad told him that there was no room, that there were too many of us, so he told my dad: 'You bourgeois!' Dad told him that we were no bourgeois, but that there were a lot of us."
"We woke up in the night and it was just reported that we were occupied. And because we didn't have a station or head [nurse] there, we got in the car and drove [to the hospital]. I said to the girls, 'First of all, the children are [important] for us, we have to feed them, bathe them, get them in order, then the rest. The doctors were always talking politics, we had to feed and pack the children...."
"The Germans came, the Gestapo, and my parents were scared because I was a kid and kids will talk about anything if someone asks them... The families of those who were in the concentration camps were supported. But it was our mother who bound and sent it. So they came to us, the Gestapo. My mother just said that she was so scared, sitting here on a chair and... they interrogated me, like a kid, they wanted to know everything that was going on. And then, at the end of the war, Mrs. Dostálová, who was German, came to us, but she just came to tell my parents that it was the Czechs who had denounced them up to the Germans."
Marie Jelínková, née Pečínková, was born on 24 January 1937 in the village of Laškov in the Prostějov region. Her father Jan Pečínka worked as a maltster in a brewery, her mother Anežka, née Švecová, as a maid in a local inn. Both parents supported the families of concentration camp prisoners and other persecuted people during the Protectorate, for which they were denounced by some of their neighbours. Fortunately, the Gestapo officers found nothing compromising during the search, so the family escaped without punishment. Because of the partisans’ activities in the surrounding forests, Laškov almost met the fate of the nearby settlement of Javoříčko. Marie Jelínková has a few memories from the end of the war, when the front was passing through Laškov. After February 1948, the communists dismissed her father from his job because he refused to establish a JZD in the village. The witness graduated from the secondary medical school and worked as a children’s nurse for over twenty years, mostly at the University Hospital in Olomouc. In the 1980s she completed her pedagogical education at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and taught professional subjects at medical schools. In the 1990s, she founded the CARITAS Higher Vocational School of Social Sciences in Olomouc, where she worked until her retirement. In 2023 she lived in the Alfred Skene Home for the elderly in Pavlovice u Přerova.
