Eliška Fořtíková

* 1942

  • "I walked to work, there were tanks on the Barikadník bridge. We surrounded them and went to ask them what are they doing here when nothing is happening. The police came from all the cities, so we had to cook until the evening. At that time, my mother told me to take Ivanka to my mother´s place in Kladno, that she would look after her. We worked non-stop until late in the evening. We cooked for all the policemen who went to Hybernská for food... It was terrible, I was very hard for me. All our lives they hammered in Russia, and then they attack us... that bothered me, it was difficult for us. They were everywhere with guns, they shot a young girl in Klárov, it was terrible."

  • "I always cried over that letter. I also wrote to her, but we had to censor it. Well, they censored it. We had to read the letters - and when I wrote that I was hungry, they didn't let me eat and I fainted at school, so I preferred to write that at school. I earned a few coins at the collection and bought a stamp - so I sent it to her. I also wrote on correspondence cards because they were the cheapest, but my mother didn't want me to write these things on them so that the postman couldn't read them."

  • "They started looking for me with my aunt through the Red Cross. So, when they found me, the Red Cross brought me back here and I no longer knew a single word of Czech. When we were driving around the Vltava, I said in German: 'Mutti, wasser!', and the Czechs almost beat up my mother. So, mom started speaking in Czech, that she was Czech and that she was coming from Berlin. Then we lived in Modřany and I learned Czech again."

  • "We made a log on allegorical wagons. Avia was split in half, at the end there were about five pioneers and I was among the children who were playing the ones from the West. We had slogans: 'We are hungry, we want to eat! Long live Lenin, long live Stalin, long live the socialist republic!' They messed up my hair, smeared me all over, I was all dirty, they tore my clothes. I was like a capitalist child. That's how they manipulated us there."

  • "Dad was telling her, 'Run!' There were houses built in square, so we ran from the house we lived to the house opposite. He said: 'I have to lock the apartment and turn off the radio, I'll take Ládík and you run to the basement with Eli.' It didn't even take a moment, my mom run to the basement with me - and then there was a shot like a cannon and our house collapsed as both houses were collapsing. We remained trapped there until they pulled us out. When they showed various films from Germany here in 1989, I had the feeling that I saw myself in one. Such a blonde girl, I have a similar photo after the war of me in a wooden washtub with a friend. So, I keep watching German programs to see if it appears there again. I had such a strange feeling at that moment. She looked like me. It was only a moment when someone was pulling a little three-year-old child out there. That's all I know."

  • Full recordings
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    Praha, 06.09.2021

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    duration: 01:23:01
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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    Praha, 23.09.2021

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    duration: 55:58
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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    Praha ED, 23.12.2022

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    duration: 02:40:24
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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Children’s home in the 1950s? Beating and psychological violence

Eliška Fořtíková
Eliška Fořtíková
photo: archive of the witness

Eliška Fortíková, née Jiráková, was born on January 3, 1942 in Berlin, where her father Ladislav Jirák (b. 1921) was totally deployed in manual labor in a factory. He came to Berlin with his already pregnant wife Jiřina. In 1943, their second child, son Ladislav, was born. The family rented a house and it was hit during the bombing in November 1944. Mother and Eliška managed to hide in the basement of the opposite house. They were rescued from the ruins, her father and Ládík did not have time to hide and died. The mother and daughter were hospitalized and here their paths diverged for many months. When the mother found a new place to live in Berlin after the bombing, she took Czechs in with her, for which she was punished by imprisonment. She was reunited with Eliška only after the end of the war in Prague, thanks to the Red Cross, which helped her find Eliška, who had already been Germanized. It turned out that Eliška’s mother, traumatized by her own past when she lost her mother, was unable to properly care for her daughter, and therefore the court decided on institutional care. In the period 1949–1956, Eliška spent several years in two children’s homes, in Česká Kamenice and in Frýdlant, both of which she has terrible memories of. She longed to return to her mother, which she did at the age of thirteen. After graduating from elementary school, she started her first job as an assistant to a corporate photographer. She was already living independently before she became an adult. She got married at the age of 21, divorced five years later, and her second marriage with Josef Fortík was a happy one. Eliška Fortíková raised two daughters. She worked as an auxiliary worker in the kitchen of the Ministry of the Interior’s canteen. She talks about the conditions in children’s homes in the 1950s and also recalls politically motivated events, such as the destruction of the bust of President Beneš ordered by the school principal, the May Day celebration, where she played a hungry ‘capitalist’ child. In her free time, she dedicated herself to children and youth throughout her life as a trainer in a physical education unit, and after the revolution as a leader of sports clubs. Her passion is cycling, she collected many medals in amateur races in which she participated until she was 70 years old.