“I had problems with communists in the national committee, because I have never been a party member, and they have sacked me for that in March 1948. But then they had to hire me back, because I submitted an appeal. I said: ´No way, this is bullshit.´ I was working in the supply department, we were going to the neighbourhoods and giving out food stamps. I displayed a little Czechoslovak flag (but not the Soviet one) so that people would be able to see where the food stamps were distributed, and they have fired me for that.”
“Early in the morning somebody rang the bell, my mom went to open the door. A policeman was asking her: ´Is your daughter at home?´ Mom answered: ´Yes, she is.´ – ´Tell her to get dressed and she will not go to work, she will come with me.´ Mom asked him why. Dad also got up and asked: ´What’s going on here? She hasn’t done anything.´ – ´She hasn’t done anything, but the gentlemen from the labour office...´ As I learnt later, somebody had informed against me that I was doing an office work, which was allegedly not fair to others. And in order for me to try some real work, they registered me for one of the last transports to Germany. I had to go with the policeman. He said: ´She’ll be waiting with me at the police station till the departure of the train. The train leaves at quarter to eleven, you’ll bring her suitcase there, she will not go home anymore.´ That’s the way it was, Czechs were doing this to Czechs.”
“For a long time there were no air raids on the labour camp, the factory was hidden in the forest. Martička and I decided that even in spite of the alarm we would stay in bed and sleep. And all of a sudden boom, crash, boom. God, bomber planes above us! What shall we do? We can’t stay here, we have to run for the shelter. We jumped out of our beds, covered our heads with blankets. They had told us: ´If you run, put a blanket over your head.´ But I think the blanket wouldn’t be of much use, perhaps only to protect your head against smaller splinters. So we ran. The splinters from flak were making a sound like wheeee, wheeee, as the Germans were shooting at the attacking Russians. The bombs were falling on our camp and on the factory, too, the bomber planes have found it.”
“What did you think about the Soviet army in Czechoslovakia? Did you notice their withdrawal? Did you get in touch with them?” – “We thought negatively about them, but not like that we would be thinking that these Soviet soldiers were not humans. Just at the end of August 1968 we were in our summer house with our family, and Soviet soldiers, young boys, came, and they were hungry. They were camping somewhere in the forest and the miller was bringing them food there, Czech people hated him for it, but we supported him, because these soldiers were humans like us, boys, who would have rather been at home than being hungry in a foreign country.”
Blanka Luňáková, née Rintová, was born in 1924 in Pilsen. She studied a girls´ grammar school, but during the war she had to suspend her studies due to conscripted labour. At first she worked as a clerk in the municipal office in Pilsen, then in a workshop in the Škoda factory. In April 1944 she was eventually sent for forced labour to Braunschweig in Germany. Her work consisted in inspecting cogwheels for aircraft manufacturing. From September 1944 till spring 1945 she was working in the Avia factory in Prague and in secret German underground factories, where she also survived the massive air raid over the Vinohrady neighbourhood. When the war ended she was working in the countryside, helping with haymaking. After the war she took a supplementary school-leaving examination and completed her studies at the teaching institute in Pilsen, graduating from teaching for elementary schools, but she has never worked as a teacher. She was employed by the Central National Committee of the statutory city of Pilsen, where she was working in the supply department, later in the culture and education department and finally in the technical department. With the exception of her maternity leave she was working there all the time till 1968. In 1968-1987 she worked as a secretary in the department of technical education at the Pedagogical Faculty in Pilsen, from whence she retired. Blanka Luňáková died in August 2012.
