“We had a lot of gym lessons. I don’t know which year that was in, but I remember we had to learn how to fight, like in a battle. It made me queasy to begin with, but then I realised I had no other option. So we learnt how to defend ourselves, even with knives, which they gave us. And then they gave us brown neckerchiefs, so we were Hitlerjugend.”
“When Mum died, my grandma, who was 73 at the time, would have had to take care of the girls - one pretty much in puberty, the second just starting school, and then Vendulka, aged twelve. That would have been too much for her, so they agreed with my aunt that Vendulka could stay with us. I was married by then, I had little Ilonka. Mum died in May, and they brought Vendulka to me in August. Dad brought her, we lived with the parents in a house in Litomyšl, where she attended school. So we went three years without a child, and then suddenly we had two, pretty much.”
“Well, when the Russians invaded us... I was completely flabbergasted. I happened to have night shift, or standby duty, that is, the other nurse was on night shift, in case they brought in a choker or something. We knitted together because things were pretty quiet. And she says: ‘Don’t go to sleep yet, come on, let’s knit a bit longer.’ But I had to go get some sleep because I had morning shift next day. And then she’s waking me up, I thought it was morning already, so I said okay, I’m getting up. She said, it’s not morning. It’s war. I had no idea what was going on. The head nurse came and said: ‘Vlasta, just imagine, the Soviet army’s here.’ I didn’t know how, why... perhaps they were mistaken, perhaps they meant the German army - that the Germans had attacked us, I wouldn’t be surprised if they returned the hurt. But she said: ‘Yeah, that’s how it is. Turn on the radio.’”
Vlasta Pakostová, née Veselá, was born on 25 May 1935 in Jičín. Soon after the outbreak of the war, her family moved to Poland, where Vlasta attended a Polish and then a German school. Her father probably worked in the mines. He helped hide fugitives in the coal, for which he was arrested and sent to a labour camp. Little Vlasta and her mother returned to Jičín, where Vlasta had to attend a German school where the children participated in Hitlerjugend activities. The other pupils did not like Vlasta, they called her a “Czech pig”. When Vlasta returned home after the war, the situation reversed and the Czech children considered her to be a “German rat”. The family moved to Lanškroun. Vlasta attended a nursing school, but apparently she was barred from passing her graduation exams due to her former German education and problems caused by her uncle’s anti-Communist activities. She succeeded in graduating later, after her marriage, and she then worked as a nurse. Vlasta Pakostová died in 2020.
