"Pallasovka was a city of thirty thousand inhabitants, but it was totally a village. They didn't really have roads in those days, just dirt roads, nothing. We became friends with the director of the local House of Culture there. Such a nice lady. And one day she invited us to her apartment, more of us Czechs went there. And it was the white brick housing estate you see in the movies. About three stories high. And she had an apartment, well furnished and everything. But when I needed to go to the bathroom, she took me to the toilet and there was a bucket. But she had a toilet bowl, but there was a bucket next to it. It threw me off balance. Well, that they... so it was a housing estate, they normally had a bathroom and a toilet, but they didn't have running water and they didn't have waste pipes. So they'd go to the bucket, and then they'd take it out, and then they'd go and get water... In the middle of the housing estate, there were about five houses, there was a well and they used to get water there and walk around with this thing on their shoulders... and two buckets hanging on it and the whole estate would go and get water. And there was a communal toilet about ten meters from the well, wooden latrines. There were maybe five latrines, the classic ones like we have, but they were only separated by a wooden partition, so that your head was outside. And so you could talk to your neighbor while relieving yourself. We were there in the winter, and it was full of frozen feces... Well, it was terrible. And there was drinking water ten meters away in a well. And that was the nature of Russians, I didn't understand that, because I'm convinced that in our country people would have already arranged it and dug the sewer themselves. No, they lived like that and they didn't care. And she was the director of the House of Culture, an intelligent woman. Well, she couldn't do anything herself, could she."
"We were starting in December, before Christmas. We took the charter flight, it was specifically for the assemblers who worked on the Orenburg. We did Christmas with the kids because my daughter turned two in October. We left in December and Marek started first grade in September. So my mother babysat them, she moved into our apartment with her husband. At that time she had her second husband and they actually lived there. Well, so there at Orenburg, we were at Pallasovka, that was the Pallasovka compressor station, and it was right on the Kazakh border in the steppes. First we went to Kamyshin, which was on the coast, on the bank of the Volga. We had to cross the Volga, it was about three hundred kilometers to Pallasovka. And I have to say, when I first saw the Volga, I cried. I had never seen such a huge river in my life, and in such a corridor, or how should I say it, it was flowing... Well, we were standing there and there was the flow of the river, just enormous. It was about eight kilometers wide at that place, and nobody can imagine. You had to take the ferry to the other side, and then about a hundred kilometers more across the steppe to that town where the base was. There were about three hundred assemblers there, maybe even more, I don't know. They moved around with wagons. And my husband was the head of the assembly administration from ČKD, and I was sort of doing everything, records of the usage of vehicles, payrolls, and I worked in the office with him. And he always used to say that the worst thing was to work with your own wife in the office. Because he always said that a stranger wouldn't dare to behave the way I did. He'd always say, 'Do this,' and I'd be like, 'Yeah, wait, I’ll do it tomorrow...' It's true, I wouldn't have said that to any other boss. And we lived there in some kind of buildings, built by VOKD Ostrava. They managed the place, they had their cleaners and maintenance men. And ČKD did the technology for the compressor station. We used to go to the compressor station from the town, it was about five kilometers across the steppe. The plain, along the railway line. It was really... ridiculous, the way women lived there at that time. Only women worked there. And we were on a bus and there was a plain far and wide along the railroad. And there were these women, maybe ten of them, and they were hammering some screws there into the sleepers. That's what they were hammering into the ground, the sleepers. And there was a man with them, and he was standing there watching to see if a train was coming. That was his job, it was terrible. And the women were working!"
"I was born on August 27, and the occupation started on the 21st, and on the 27th I was turning eighteen. And in that week, right after the occupation, there were discussions, they spoke to the people, and Mr. Vaculík was in our house of culture. At that time they wanted the Communist Party to get stronger, because they were also surprised by the occupation. And I was so excited... and I came home, and I told my parents that I was going to join the party on my 18th birthday. Jesus Christ! My dad told me: 'Don't you dare! If you join the party, don’t ever come back! I’ll kick you out!!' So he actually saved me from a lot of trouble. I didn't join the party because then it would have been a lot of trouble to get out of it again, you know. I certainly wouldn't have stayed when everything changed. Well, but that was the time when ours... really the Prague Spring, that was socialism with a human face... they were really excited about it. And they even let us go to Denmark, they were really enthusiastic about it. And what was crazy... that they used to drive past our house, we lived in Kadaň in a high-rise, and there is a main road from Klášterec, well, they used to take that road. We used to look out of the window, we lived on the ninth floor, and we used to look down as the tanks were coming, terrible, you know. My father and a friend of his were turning, there were direction signs in the middle of that intersection, so they were turning those."
Bronislava Nedvědová was born on August 27, 1950 in Brno. When she was one year old, she moved to Česká Lípa with her parents and her sister Dana, who was four years older than her. In 1964, however, her sister accidentally died. Her grieving parents then could not stand staying in their apartment in Česká Lípa, so they moved to Kadaň, where they both got jobs at the construction of the Tušimice power plant. The contemporary witness graduated from the Technical School of Electrical Engineering in Chomutov. She got married at the age of twenty and had her first son Marek. However, it did not take long for the young couple to start having problems. They both wanted to enjoy life, but they had vastly different ideas about it and so in the end they got divorced. In 1975, the contemporary witness got married the second time, by then she was already pregnant with a daughter. Due to higher salaries, she and her husband decided to go to the Soviet Union, where they worked for two years at the Pallasovka compressor station near the Kazakh border, building the Soyuz pipeline, which starts in Orenburg. At that time, Bronislava Nedvedova’s mother was taking care of the children. After returning from the Soviet Union, the young family moved to Rumburk, North Bohemia. There, the contemporary witness became interested in politics and public affairs in the city, in which she was actively involved throughout her whole life. She was a long-time representative and the leader of the political movement Město lidem. After her retirement, she worked as a coordinator in the Rumburk residence for Ukrainian refugees V Podhájí since 2022. In 2023, Bronislava Nedvědová was living in Rumburk.
