Anna Šestáková
* 1918 †︎ 2023
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“After a few days, someone rang in the morning. Two men and one woman. They showed me legitimization, that they were from the State Security and told me: 'Your husband is with us. He committed anti-state activity. We have two cars outside. In one you go with us and in the other children go because this apartment must be empty." That was their “Imperial Agents will come”.My husband was supposed to make heron: 'We'll bring your husband here and there may be a shootout, so you have to go away. And we don't want to pull a reluctant woman, we want this to happen in a normal way.So what could I do? I couldn't defend myself. "
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“We packed! There we lost a lot. Then I thought, in fact, there was no settlement, for example, because you couldn't move draft counters and such great things, so we took what we could. We still have cutlery, we were examining them lately, where we have a "restaurant at train station", such small things, we've taken what we could. Of course, we couldn't take tables and I don't know what was there."
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“I knew that in order to catch up with the morning interrogation in Prague, they had to go from Bratislava at night. I waited for it and they really did travel in it. I begged the warden to allow me to tell my husband at least what marks children received on their grade reports.He didn't want to allow me that. All the way I was standing in front of the coupe, to at least be able to catcha glimpse of my husband, he was in a terrible shape. Of course, I don't have to tell you why he was the reason. Everyone know, which methods of interrogation they were using in 1950s."
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Full recordings
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Bratislava, 22.01.2019
(audio)
duration: 01:59:46
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Respect freedom, don’t play with it
Anna Šestáková was born in Myjava at the end of the First World War, still in Austo-Hungarian empire. She comes from a family of a tradesman and a café operator Pavel Ušiak. In addition to Anna, her father had three older sons from the first marriage . After the death of Anna’s mother, he married a second time, and this marriage gave birth to Anna’s only sister. In the early 1930s, the family moved to Košice, where Anna experienced multi-ethnicity in the reality of interwar Czechoslovakia. As a result of the Vienna arbitration, the metropolis of the East fell to Hungary and the family of Sestaks moved to Bratislava. There Anna met a Moravian engineer Ervín Šesták, whom she soon married and had three children with him. At the end of World War II, Anna had to leave Bratislava; she spent passing of the frontline in Myjava. After the communist regime came, her husband was detained and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment for subverting the republic. Anna, who was with her three children subsequently forced to move out of her apartment in Bratislava, as part of “Action B”, lived in modest proportions with a mother in law in Moravia. Ervín Šesták was released after six years of imprisonment and the spouses subsequently endured the regime’s pressure on their family together. Anna Šestáková died on April 15, 2023 at the age of 104..
