Adelheida Pačková

* 1943

  • „On 15 March 1939, when Czechoslovakia was occupied by Hitler, the men in the Hlučín region received conscription orders and had to join the Wehrmacht. My father received a conscription order on 25 November 1939 and had to join the barracks in Poland, which is today's Hlubčice. He had been gone for six whole years. In 1945, German soldiers were imprisoned in Russia, my father was among them. They were put in camps and told that they will be in the camp until they rebuild what they destroyed during the war. They were starving, even a hundred guys were sleeping on boards, and when one wanted to turn around at night, they all had to turn around because they were glued to each other. And then, on February 2, 1947, my mother received a notification that my father was already in the territory of Czechoslovakia, that he was in Kuřim, which was a camp where they put prisoners, and that it would take a few months before he could return home. My mother didn't know anything about him for two years, whether he was alive or not, so they were happy that he was already in our territory. I was less than three years old at the time. Then when my mother got the notification that she was to come to Kuřim for my father, and my father came back, everyone said to me: 'That's your dad.' I defended myself that it's not him, that it's some guy. Because he was a stranger to me.“

  • „In 1951, grandfather Jan died and my father had to take his place. He started in 1956 or a little later. The mill had one floor at the time and he wanted to grind more for the wider area, so he raised the whole mill by one floor. He bought machinery, wanted to install it and grind for a larger area, because at that time there were not many mills around. In 1961, however, the mill was nationalised and it came under the control of Silesian mills and Olomouc bakeries. After that, my father no longer invested in it because it was nationalised. They let it grind until 1965. Then they stopped the mill completely. This made my father very ill. He had a stroke, he was 40 years old. He was on sick leave for half a year, unable to work. Then he got to the gypsum mine.“

  • "I think that collectivization happened in 1952 and people were given crofts. The communists took the big fields back then, but the people had crofts and from those crofts they also had grain. What were they supposed to do with it? I don't know how many ares they could have. They always drove what they threshed to our mill. They also were people from other villages around us, so there was a lot. One gentleman always stayed with us for a month after the harvest. There was a divan where you could lie down, but you couldn't sleep. We also heard the noise of the mill in the house where we lived, because one wall was shared. Dad thought it couldn't be closed. It seemed abnormal to him that the mill would close and he would not have a job."

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    Ostrava, 20.10.2021

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That’s a stranger. She didn’t want to hug her father when he returned from Russian captivity

Adelheida Pačková / 1947
Adelheida Pačková / 1947
photo: archive of Adelheida Pačková

Adelheida Pačková, née Čujková, was born on October 23, 1943 in Kobeřice in the Hlučín region. It was then part of the German Third Reich. The family owned and operated a mill. The father had to enlist in the Wehrmacht at the beginning of World War II. He was captured by the Russians and returned only in 1947. The Communists nationalised their prosperous mill in 1961 and closed it in 1965. They also confiscated their house, for which they then had to pay rent. The father then worked as a porter in a gypsum mine. Adelheida was raised Catholic and did not hide her faith even in adulthood. She wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, but was not recommended because of her religion. She graduated from the gymnasium in Hlučín. Until her retirement, she worked as a planner and supervisor at a press factory for new materials in Chuchelná. She raised a daughter with her husband František Paček. In 2021, she lived in Kobeřice.