Alena Posltová

* 1930

  • “Before they put me in jail I had a big love, but a really big one. And this guy later wrote me a letter saying that he’s got to quit with me as he would get into trouble in his job. I still have that letter somewhere. It was a terrible time, I thought that… Well, it’s a fact, he wrote me this letter. He was studying in Pardubice and I lived there. Once he came to me and told me that he was really sorry but couldn’t help it. I couldn’t take it anymore and told him to go away, that there was nothing left to say and that I didn’t trust him anymore. Of course that I later cried my eyes out. Something like that stays in you forever.”

  • “In the Chrudim prison, the entrance driveway was paved with wooden cobblestones. Once me and Blanka Zachová had to scrub the way. We were kneeing there and scrubbing it hard and as soon as we finished it someone came with bread and we had to start it over again. When we were doing it for the third time I got angry and told the patrol sergeant: ‘Mister sergeant, shall we cream it?’. He looked at me and said: ‘three days’. That was my punishment.”

  • “Once I was suffering from pneumonia and I felt very weak. When you have pneumonia, you mostly have high fever. The patrol sergeant thought I just made it up and that I’m a saboteur. But I could barely stand and wiggled. He thought I pretended it and got mad. So he punched me with his fist in the face and knocked two of my teeth out.”

  • “When I came back, I mean when they released me, I wasn’t allowed to come to Litomyšl. The regional prosecutor, a certain Goldschmied, told me that I can’t go to Litomyšl. I told him that I had my parents in Litomyšl. He replied that I had to work in the heavy industry and that I would be assigned somewhere. So I had to start to work in the Tesla factory where a position had been arranged for me.” Interviewer: “What were your plans and hopes in prison for your future live?” “I had no plans and no hope at all. Of course, when I talked to the prosecutor, I asked him about my future, what is going to happen to me. He told me that they’d tell me what to do. That’s how I lost my illusions. You know when someone tells you that you’ll be told what your career will be, it’s rather daunting. Well, they told me to work as a lathe operator so I worked as a lathe operator.”

  • “There was a girl in the prison, her name was Dáša Malinová. She was good. She was fed up with eating hard bread so she said: ‘girls, we’re not gonna eat this anymore, I’m gonna go and see the doctor’. When she came back she said: ‘girls, here’s two bottles of coughing water and if you dip a piece of bread in it, it doesn’t taste too bad’. When she went to see the doctor for the second time, she came back with cigarettes. She realized that we’d stay there and adapted to it.”

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    Litomyšl, 08.08.2008

    (audio)
    duration: 01:23:46
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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“When you returned from prison, people were literally disappearing in the archways in front of you.”

IMG_1417.jpg (historic)
Alena Posltová
photo: Ondřej Bratinka

Alena Posltová was born in 1930 in Litomyšl. She studied at a grammar school and graduated in 1949. She was a member of a girl-brigade of the Boy Scout since 1945. In 1948 she was a member of a student delegation to the leadership of the school that demanded the boycott of the general strike of the trade unions that was taking place in Czechoslovakia. The left and the trade unions presented the general strike as a demonstration of the popular support for the reshuffling of the government. In fact, it was meant to serve as a prelude to the Communist coup that took place the next day. In 1949 Alena Posltová took part in one of the meetings of the group ‘Hvězda’ organized by her schoolmate Miloslav Kohout. The purpose of the group was to take an active stand against the official ‘Czechoslovak union of the youth’ that had a devastating effect on the Boy Scout movement in Czechoslovakia. After she graduated from grammar school in 1949 she left for Prague without any further possibility to be engaged in the group. In the academic year of 1949/1950 she took up studies at two faculties of Prague’s Charles University simultaneously. She studied teaching at the Pedagogical faculty and Czech language and literature at the Philosophical faculty. Even though she wasn’t involved in the activities of the group except for the attendance of one meeting, she was arrested by the police for anti-state activities. The arrest took place in the autumn of 1949 and she was interrogated for three days at the infamous office Nr. 4. in Bartolomějská Street in Prague. She remained quiet about the arrest after her release and continued in her studies. However, she was arrested again on 16 September, 1950, this time in Litomyšl where she went after she had completed her last exam. She was one of the defendants in the trial with the principal Stříteský and with her former schoolmates. She was sentenced to ten years for treason on 11 October, 1950. Her sentence was eventually reduced to two years after she had appealed to the Supreme Court in Prague. Altogether she spent 13 months in jail before she was paroled. Except for Bartolomějská Street, she served her term in Chrudim and in Stíčany near Hrochův Týnec. After she was released from prison she had to work for one year outside of Litomyšl as a lathe operator in the Tesla factory in Pardubice. She was only granted to return home to her parents for health reasons. In Litomyšl, she later worked as an auxiliary worker in the Vertex glass works.