Much bad was good for something
Pěvuše Kohoutová was born in 1920 in the town of Vysoké Veselí in the Eastern Bohemia, where her father served as a gendarme. Because of her father’s profession, the family often moved, first to Upper Old Town near Trutnov and later to Kravaře near Česká Lípa, where they also experienced a change in the coexistence of Czechs and Germans after the seizure of the Sudetenland. Before the war, the family moved to Přeštice, where her father was commander of the police station. The witness married in Přeštice, remembers the course of the war, the liberation of the city by General Patton, who came here with Marlene Dietrich, but also the events associated with the wildly expulsion of the Germans. Between 1945-1948 she spent a happy period in Klenčí pod Čerchovem, where her husband became a postmaster. Pěvuše Kohoutová explains the hierarchy of postal officials, which changed after the February coup. In 1949, her husband delivered a pastoral letter to the rectory of the then Archbishop and later Cardinal Josef Beran despite the ban and refused to disclose postal secrets. He lost his job and was transferred to the production process under the so-called Action 77; he was first employed in Škoda in Pilsen, where he survived in an unheated apartment. Finally he returned to the post office in Klenčí, where he worked together with the witness until retirement.