Marcela Pustinová

* 1939

  • "On the 20th of August we crossed the border, we were in Austria on a wonderful wine and schnitzel party. Early in the morning someone knocked on our door. Pustina [husband] had relatives there, émigrés who left when they had no jobs here. Pustina's mother's cousin lived in Austria. He knocked on the door: 'You are occupied by Russians!' I found out on the morning of the twenty-first in Austria. We had a foreign currency certificate. Have you got any idea what it took to get it and the money to travel? You don't. We decided to go on. We stayed with relatives in Austria for two or three days and then we went to Munich. Pustina had a friend there, a classmate from college. We could have stayed with them. It was still a question of what to do next. It was terrible for me, I didn't want to. Pustina listed for me all the downsides that awaited us. In the end, I put my head down."

  • "My mom wasn't home; I was home, and they took him [my dad] away. Then I ran to a friend with whom we had good contacts, and I said, 'Mr Vozár, they took dad, where do you think he went?' He said, 'Of course they took him to Malacky to the National Committee.' I said, 'I want to go see him.' He said, 'Sit down' and drove me there. I remember I found my father. The doorman said, 'Go round the corner. I went around the building.' There was a little coal window in the basement; that's where he was. I said, 'Dad!' He said, 'Tell Mum this and this and this.' I guess it was a good thing I went in there. Mum was angry, but not so angry since I brought her a message from Dad. I found him there."

  • "I have a letter from the national committee: 'If you do not move out in a week, you will be forcibly detached.' Mum did what she could. They gave us a municipal hut with a dirt floor. Mum put a Persian carpet on it because she had nothing else. The house has always had parquet floors. The Dokupils were progressive: parquet floors, bathroom, they tried to furnish both the factory and the apartment. The only one who helped my mother was her father. If there were ever controversies between my daughter and my grandson, I told them, 'Listen, I never heard my mother call my father anything other than daddy in my life. He was the only one who came from Czechia and helped my mother move into the little hut. I guess they put the other stuff in storage somewhere. Then Mum rebelled and they let us use a villa. They gave us a room and a kitchen, and mum and I got very much in the way there. Mum got angry, had everything packed up and we left for Plzeň where my grandfather and grandmother lived. They had a room and a kitchen. They gave us the room and used the kitchen."

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    Zblov, 11.09.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 03:05:18
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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Mum remained proud and hung a crystal chandelier over the clay floor

Marcela Pustinová in the late 1950s
Marcela Pustinová in the late 1950s
photo: Witness's archive

Marcela Pustinová was born in Bratislava on 18 July 1939 and lived with parents in Velké Leváry where her father Ján Dokupil worked in a family candle factory. Mum Zdenka Bejvančinská came from Plzeň from a family of bakers. Before the arrival of the frontline, the father hid and bricked up their wax stock. Marshal Malinovsky spent a night in their house in April 1945. The factory was nationalized after 1948. In 1952, after a denunciation, the wax stock was discovered and her father was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison, which he served, among other places, in Jáchymov. The witness and her mother were evicted from the house. They went to live with her grandparents in Plzeň, where the witness graduated from high school in 1957. She completed a two-year extension course on railway industry and started working in the library. She married Pavel Pustina and in 1964 they moved to Prague and had a daughter Eva. The witness worked at the State Library of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in Klementinum. She spent August 1968 on holiday in Austria. After returning home they emigrated to Germany, but after two months they returned and got a divorce some time after. In the early 1980s, she was interrogated by the StB about her ex-husband’s emigration. Later she worked in the Sport Turist travel and Slovakoturist agencies. She ran a private travel agency after 1989. She lived in Prague and in a cottage in Zblov in 2024.