“The secretary and my class teacher came up to me and said: ‘Marta, come with us quickly.’ They showed me my application, and I saw what the headmaster wrote in it, below what my parents had signed: not recommended for admission. The secretary told me: ‘The headmaster’s out of the office today. You need to rewrite your place of residence to have a better chance.’ There were no copiers at the time, so she retyped the entire application for me, and my class teacher signed it and said: ‘Get your parents to sign it and bring it back as soon as you can. I’ll send it out before the headmaster comes back.’ Simply put, I guess there were still kind people who knew that I was not a bad person and that should not suffer [for whatever someone else did]. When you are fifteen years old, you see things very much in black and white – you see either the good or the bad in the world. I couldn’t understand why – what it was I did so wrong that the headmaster took this revenge on me. I knew they hated my parents, but I still couldn’t grasp how children figured into it. The communists were terribly malicious that way, in that they took revenge on parents by persecuting children, and vice versa. Few political regimes are so atrocious, I suppose.”
“Dad was on total deployment at the Zbrojovka arms factory at the time, and they would smuggle out ammo and weapons for the partisans, blow up utility towers, and so on. He almost never spoke about it, and I eventually learned that he played quite a pivotal role in it from other members of the movement who were in it with him but didn’t get the recognition. I would suspect that dad had done ‘something’ from hints and so on, but I really only learned about it after the [Velvet] Revolution when Ms Andělová approached him. She was looking for people who did that during wartime, and insisted that my dad speak out because she believed he deserved appreciation. I know the Mayor of Vsetím came to visit dad later on when dad was seriously ill, but even so it gave him satisfaction I guess.”
“I know my grandpa was involved in some anti-communist resistance right after 1948. It started out quite innocent – by distributing leaflets. I know the StB officers knocked his teeth out during his first interrogation. I know he was then in prison in [Uherské] Hradiště, where the infamous Grebeníček worked later on. I know he hated tomatoes all his life. Since he was a barber, he was allowed to walk through some gardens where tomatoes grew. He was so hungry he ate the tomatoes even though he hated them so much.”
Marta Orolinová, née Pardubová, was born in Vsetín on 2 May 1953 as the elder of two children to parents Hana Pardubová and Jiří Parduba. Her parents were teachers who had a strong bond to the folkloric music and were members of the Sokol sports association. The father was a co-founder of the Vsacan folkloric ensemble in Vsetín. When he completed high school, he was on forced deployment in the Vsetín arms factory and was involved with the resistance movement. After 1948, the witness’s paternal grandparents’ hairdressing salon and barber shop were nationalised, and grandfather Jaroslav Parduba was imprisoned for subversive activity, having disseminated anti-communist leaflets. He was in prison in Uherské Hradiště. The family lost their savings as a result of the currency reform in 1953. Due to her ‘cadre profile’, Marta Orolinová faced issues with admission to a university; she eventually completed a grammar school, a two-year healthcare institute, and then the Sanitary Medical School of Charles University. She collected signatures on a petition against the Warsaw Pact armies’ invasion in 1968. She married physician František Orolin in 1976, and the couple have two children. The family lived in Slovakia, then in Gottwaldov, and she and her husband came back to Vsetín after 1991. The witness’s brother Jiří emigrated in 1984. She has worked all her life as a physician in the field that she graduated in. She lived in Vsetín at the time of recording in 2022.
