Eva Zubková

* 1933

  • "It was the first Sunday in July and my dad went to Prague because he had a meeting there. A gentleman was going to meet him on his bicycle and receive a package he was carrying. Only the boys got a flat tire on their bike so they didn't go and that was maybe the only lucky thing that the boys were saved. The Germans also came on a bicycle, they went to see my father, he walked from Prague to Háje. He went by the back, they went by the road. They came looking for him, dad was in the house and my brother grabbed the package and ran away with it. When they came, they threatened to shoot us if he didn't come out. Dad came out with my sister in his arms. They wanted the thing, did a check and found nothing. So they took dad away. There were three Gestapo and one Czech. And he turned dad in."

  • "The Protectorate brought changes, that we had everything on tickets. Every month we packed 10 dekagram of hard candy, 10 dekagram of chocolate candy, an eighth of a liter of milk a day, otherwise 10 dekagram of meat. Those were the tickets, when you went to buy salami, for example, they cut off a coupon because you were limited, you couldn't eat more... I didn't realize that as a child. Mum made us food and we ate it, so we didn't worry about it. ... You know, it wasn't lit, the cars ran on wood gas. They had this boiler in the back and they'd heat it up so they could run. The windows were blacked out, it wasn't allowed to be lit, the streets were dark, we used to walk around with a torch that had a red screen so it wouldn't light up because of the air raids..."

  • "We were sleeping, for example, and there weren't as many cars then as there are now. The Háje was a small village, and when a car came, it was Germans and they came to us. We heard the car, they were banging too. Mum always said: Don't let them surprise you in your sleep, because that's saying a lot... So we each had our own chair by the bed and we had our things piled up the way they dress. So when they came in at night, they always came in around 4 o'clock, so we were already dressed, we were ready."

  • "When my mother wasn't working, the people in the group... someone always came in the evening, put a bag of stuff outside our door and left. The envelope with the money was on the window and we didn't know who brought it... Not even food, not even money, because mummy didn't work and dad was arrested, so we didn't have any income. The Germans had cut off our electricity, so we had no radio, no money, nothing. For example, my mother was hanging laundry in the garden, and suddenly a masked man appeared, gave her everything and left again. He always went across the field. They must have been the people who worked with my father against the Germans from the Janecek factory. The people who lived there were afraid of us, they avoided us because they were afraid that the Germans would arrest them too if they talked to us."

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    u pamětnice doma, 22.04.2018

    (audio)
    duration: 47:50
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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Children, don’t let them surprise you in your sleep. Forget the bad stuff.

Eva Zubková
Eva Zubková
photo: archive of the witness

Eva Zubková, née Hlavatá, was born on 13 October 1933 in Prague, where her whole family lived. Her father worked in the factory of ing. Janeček. Her mother was a housewife. She had three older brothers and one younger sister. During the Heydrichiad, the family moved to Háje outside Prague (now part of Prague), where they lived in a small house with a garden. In July 1942, her father Antonín Hlavatý was arrested - Eva was less than 9 years old at the time. Since the arrest, the family had not seen dad again because political prisoners were not allowed to visit. Only from a colleague of her grandfather, who worked on the railroad, did the family learn that the father had been taken by the Germans from Prague by train to Auschwitz. The family only learned of their father’s death from a death certificate brought to them by a gendarme. According to it, dad died of pneumonia in Auschwitz. In addition to dad, the older brother Ladislav, who was 17 years old at the time, was also arrested. He was taken to the Petschek Palace, where the Gestapo was based. After two days he was released - his teeth were knocked out during interrogation. After the arrest of the father, the family did not have it easy, they lost the breadwinner. That’s why dad’s friends from the resistance helped them. They secretly gave them money or food in their backpacks. Eva remembers Gestapo visits after dad’s arrest - most often at night they came to search their belongings. Eva’s grandfather was also arrested because he was secretly listening to radio broadcasts from London. He would then tell the news on the street - where the Russians were already and where the Americans were. One of those people turned him in. When they came to arrest him, little Eva was visiting her grandfather and grandmother. He was sent to work in the Polish salt mines. After the war, he came home, but he died a few months later because his feet were burned while mining salt in Poland and it couldn’t be cured. The witness also experienced the liberation of Prague - how the barricades were built, the firefights and the shelter from the bombing. After the war, she studied at a factory labor school with a focus on health care and then worked as a nurse for a dentist in Karlovy Vary. She married in 1954 and had a daughter. When her daughter was a year old, her husband died of leukemia. She was living in Carlsbad at the time of the interview.