Věra Peštuková

* 1939

  • "The journey was, I would say, dangerous. Or so my mother thought. The first thing she stressed to us, because my grandmother, I didn't call her grandmother, she didn't know a word of Czech, and neither did I, she said: 'You mustn't talk to each other on the train, because they might throw us off the train.' And the sight of the broken Opava. I was living under Breda, that's the Breda & Weinstein department store, so the whole row of houses up to the theatre was bombed out, the front walls were broken and everything else was black, burnt, broken. So it was a terrible sight for me, because Opava was a beautiful city, we used to go to the park, so what I suddenly saw, I knew that this is what war brings."

  • "When we returned and I stood with my back to Breda & Weinstein, a department store built in 1928 by Leopold Bauer, I could only see the front walls of the buildings. Everything was burnt, black. And it made a deep impression on the child. They said that eighty percent, maybe fifty percent of the city was completely destroyed, because a little further on was this big battlefield. There's still a memorial at Hrabyně today. So we [my mother and I] had to leave, so we experienced the horror afterwards, after the fighting."

  • "She wasn't allowed on the sidewalk. And as it happened, a young guy was walking with a gun, probably from the Revolutionary Guard, and he pushed her off the sidewalk with the butt of his gun. My mother was a very pretty woman, dark-haired, and she was thirty-four years old. So a beautiful woman - and he didn't care. As soon as it was N, off with her. And when she started going to the Czech workplace, 'But you're not Czech,' always so sarcastically to my mother. But she was a hard worker, she rode the tram, she sold in a pastry shop, she was a barmaid in the Koruna Hotel in Opava. She knew her way around any job, but she was professionally trained around children. She also had difficult moments. No support, nothing, a brother in Germany. So it was just the two women. It wasn't easy."

  • "My mother was given a armband and an N. And she was not of German descent, but she had a German education because she was born into a family where German was spoken, according to the grandfather who died so soon. My mother went to German schools and didn't know a word of Czech. Then she went to Slovakia, so she learned Slovak, but I didn't know a word, not even how to say hello."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Jeseník, 08.09.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:37:05
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Jeseník, 20.09.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 24:09
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 3

    Jeseník, 09.04.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 01:48:55
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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Once it was N, get her out of here.

Věra Peštuková (Pavlíková), graduation photo from 1956
Věra Peštuková (Pavlíková), graduation photo from 1956
photo: archive of the witness

Věra Peštuková was born on 20 April 1939 in Považská Bystrica in the then independent Slovak state. Her parents had different national origins. Her father Jaroslav Pavlík was Czech, her mother Edeltraud, née Rzeszotková, had Polish roots but grew up in a German environment. After her parents divorced, her mother and Vera moved to Opava. In 1945, after the Germans declared Opava a fortress town, they went to live with relatives in Falknov nad Ohří (today’s Sokolov), where they experienced the end of the war and the arrival of the American army. On their return to bombed-out Opava, they found their house looted. The mother was then identified by the authorities as German and the family was threatened with being included in the German expulsion. Thanks to a bribe, they were eventually allowed to stay. In the 1950s, Věra graduated from medical school and then worked as a nurse at the URL, first at the hospital in Krnov and then in Ostrava at Fifejdy. In 1962 she married Miroslav Peštuka, with whom she had daughters Barbora and Veronika between 1962 and 1965. Her husband was expelled from the Communist Party for his opposition to the invasion by Warsaw Pact troops during the normalisation inspections. He was prevented from advancing in his job and was not allowed to hold managerial positions, even though he had the appropriate training. In 1969, the family moved to Jeseník, where Věra Peštuková worked as a nurse in the local spa. After the fall of communism, she took advantage of the opening of the borders and in 1995 worked as a caregiver in Germany for half a year. After returning in 2011, she worked as a guide for German tourists at the Priessnitz Spa in Jeseník. At the time of filming in 2023 she was still living in Jeseník.