Halina Staňková

* 1936

  • "I don't know how it happened exactly, but my mother was in the hospital in Rovna and there was a Jewish doctor there. And my mother said that she heard him, that he lived in the room above the room that my mother was lying in, and that she heard him going back and forth all the time, and then that he probably wanted to run away through the garden, and then suddenly there was a shot and they shot him in the garden. That's what my mother said."

  • "They were poorer. They came to help us from time to time. Of course, ours couldn't manage the thirteen hectares on their own at that time. We were still small, you see. So they had to hire a farmhand and a housemaid. And the horror of it was that they hired a Ukrainian boy for the summer, about ten or twelve years old, a shepherd who herded the cattle, and he slept in the barn on a plank bed above the cattle. He used to sleep there in the horror of the flies around and all that. When we remembered it afterwards, when our boys were about ten, my mother said, 'Oh my God, how could I have let that Stanik graze the cows, how could I have let him go among them?' I mean, the boy had to draw water from the well, he had to draw water, we had water on a winch in the well, he had to draw the water, pour it into the trough for the cattle to drink, and he did all that alone. And then in the fall, his dad came and took the boy and took, not money, but potatoes, beetroots, grain, and just everything paid for the child labor."

  • "One of their sisters joined the Russian militia. Out of those many siblings, just this one sister joined the Russians, and the Banderites killed the whole family, the whole families of all those siblings. That was terrible. As a little frog, I was at the time, I ran to visit Mařenka Bělohoubková and her family lived behind them in the next house. And so I came across this daddy lying there with an axe in his hand at the door, trying to defend himself, and the mother was on the bed holding one child in her arms, pressing him to her, and another child was shot in the cradle."

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    Náměšť na Hané, 16.03.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:41:48
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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We’ve survived the terror of three regimes

Halina Staňková in 1937
Halina Staňková in 1937
photo: Halina Staňková’s personal archive

Halina Staňková (née Zajícová) was born on 15 May 1936 in Hlynsk, Volhynia. Her father, Vladimír Zajíc, was a descendant of one of many families that moved from Austria-Hungary to the Volhynia region (today’s part of Ukraine) with the prospect of tax breaks and cheap land. The Zajíc family had a large farm, which led to the threat of deportation to Siberia and expropriation of their property by the Stalinist regime in 1941. The family was saved by the violation of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact i.e. the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany. Many Volhynian settlers welcomed the Wehrmacht soldiers with enthusiasm. Only until the Nazis began to systematically murder Jews, and anyone who stood in their way during the war campaign. Halina’s father later joined the newly formed Czechoslovak Army Corps, where he served as a supply officer. He did not meet the family until 1947 when the Zajics moved to Czechoslovakia. The family settled in Libina in Central Moravia, where Vladimír Zajíc secured a house and farm left by the displaced Sudeten Germans. After the onset of communism in 1948, the Zajíc family was again labeled kulaks. In order for Halina to graduate from the Secondary School of Agriculture in Olomouc, her father had to join the Unified Agricultural Cooperative (JZD), but he had a disagreement with the locals and was therefore expelled from the cooperative. His departure as a farmer who perfectly fulfilled disproportionately increased demands of goods by the state led to the weakening of the cooperative, which caused other peasants to leave as well. The management of the JZD begged Vladimir Zajíc to return in vain. After his death in 1957, the family decided to hand over the farm a second time. Halina married Ladislav Staňek the same year, with whom she raised two sons, Stanislav and Miloš. At the time of the interview, she was living in Home for the Elderly František in Náměšť na Hané.