Marcela Míková

* 1942

  • "Because the kids were little, we had a house by the road and I remember it like today. We had these little windows and the kids were lying there by the windows going, 'Tanks are coming, look, it's rumbling, tanks!' That one was five years old and that one was three years old, two years old to those kids. And I was so scared. My mother called me at work: 'Don't worry, please don't go anywhere.' Shops were sold out, everything was sold out, food, that there would be a war. So there was a warehouse. There was nothing to buy. It was terrible, the occupation. Terrible."

  • "I have one memory too... We were living in Sedlčany and we were sitting at the table when he came from that... We were talking, talking, and it was this apartment, there were stairs. Just an old building, and people used to go round to these flats again, didn't they. And now just down those stairs somebody was walking past us, past our door, and the shoe was clicking like that, and as it went past our door, we were sitting at the table and dad stood up quickly, he froze like that. It was just so moving, we were all crying. Well, he just thought it was the one coming for him, so he quickly took off his hat and stood at attention. He did that about twice more before he got used to the fact that he was home and he didn't have to."

  • "Well they arrested him and he went around the prisons. One after another. The first one was at Bory, I went to see him there, I remember visiting him. And there was a... a long counter, that's where we came. There was this... and we could rest our hands on it and there was a sheet of metal on top and there were holes in it. It was just perforated sheet metal. Well, we were talking there, so we couldn't see him at all and we were just looking into the sheet metal. I was little, so my mother put me up on the one where the hands were resting on it. It was free up there so I could look at it through the metal sheets. Well, the guard grabbed me and pulled me down and told me I couldn't go down there, and I fell on my hand and started crying and that was the end of the visit. That was terrible stuff, you wouldn't believe it."

  • “Memories - I have one memory of that, we went to Bory, my mother took us to visit. We didn't see him there at all, because there was a counter, there was sheet glass up to the ceiling, kind of perforated, and there was only a small window at the top. So, my mother - I remember - dropping me off to look at him through that window, at least to see him. And the janitor who was there grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the window, so that I hurt my hand. I remember that I cried a lot and we immediately left, we were there for about fifteen minutes.”

  • "It was bad in Sedlčany, because the teacher there told me right away - at that elementary school - that he absolutely wouldn't let me attend school anywhere, that I wasn't allowed. Because my mother, since we didn't have the money, thought there was a gymnasium in Sedlčany, so I would go to that gymnasium; that I attend grammar school so that I can graduate. They still wanted me to graduate. And he said: 'Impossible, she won't go anywhere here.' He told me, 'If mommy and daddy got a divorce and she rejected him,'—as if he's the traitor—'we'll let you go to school.' Well, I was... I know that I cried there, I said that mommy will never, daddy... she would never divorce him.”

  • "He didn't want me to go to Pionyr, and I didn't want to go to Sedlčany. And I remember that everyone just had to be in Pionýr. So at that time they chased me around the square in Sedlčany, they sent three children after me and they chased me and forcibly dragged me to that school and I simply had to go to that Pionýr. And in that letter, but I don't have it here, he also writes somewhere that he's very sorry, that I'm the pioneer, but that he can't say anything against it because he doesn't know what it looks like outside and that it probably had to be that probably nothing could be done. But he writes to me there: 'Please, just don't show up anywhere in that costume and don't go anywhere.'"

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Příbram, 04.12.2018

    (audio)
    duration: 59:16
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Praha, 17.04.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:52:16
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

All the bad serves someting good in your life

Graduation photos, 1960
Graduation photos, 1960
photo: archiv pamětnice

Marcela Míková, née Peštová, was born on August 3, 1942 in Sedlčany. Bohumil Pešta’s father served in the Czechoslovak army before the Second World War. During the war he commanded one of the units of the partisan group Death of Fascism. In May 1945, he disarmed German soldiers in Vysoké Chlumec near Sedlčany, then he was transferred to Sokolov. In 1948, he was transferred to the garrison in Žatec, where Marcela started going to first grade. Bohumil Pešta was involved in the anti-communist resistance group Prague – Žatec. On March 9, 1949, Bohumil Pešta was arrested in Podbořany and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He served his sentence in Bory, Mírov, and Leopoldov prisons and spent most of his sentence in Bytíz. In 1952, the family was evicted from the military apartment in Žatec, the mother moved with her two children to Příbram, Marcela continued her schooling in Sedlčany. Here they refused to take her to any secondary school, so she entered the secondary economic school in Příbrami. In May 1960, fourteen days before Marcela’s graduation, Bohumil Pešta was released from prison as part of an amnesty. Marcela started working in a brewery in Vysoké Chlumec after graduation, got married in 1961 and had two sons and a daughter. In the years 1961–1963, she worked at the ČSAD, and after maternity leave at the present-day Legionary Gymnasium in Příbram in the years 1967–1974. From 1976 until her retirement in 1997, she worked as an administrative worker and accountant at the Secondary Technical School in Příbram. She still lives in Příbram, he already has seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.