Marie Halgašová

* 1947

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  • "She travelled for six months; they weren't married, nothing. Then she wrote to ask if she could stay. She asked her mum and me too. My grandmother told her before she left, 'Don't you ever think of coming back in six months leaving Fedor [Theodor] alone.' Our grandmother was reasonable. She also said, 'You left your daughter behind, and she's taking care of me, you're both take care of me.' So it was kind of..." - "Do you remember when your mother first wrote you that she got married and wasn't coming back?" - I got that, it was some time down the line. That was over six months later, something like that. Six months or so." - "Did she send you a wedding picture?" - "They did. They got married in a church because my dad's religious and so is my mom. The bishop married them. It was just the two of them and the witnesses, that's it. I recall both my dad and mom told me that the bishop said, 'Your actual wedding was when you made your vows under that cherry tree,' and it was true. Who could have stood it that long?"

  • "They wanted to get married. Dad said let's marry and they went to cour I guess in Chvalšiny. They no, he was a foreigner and they didn't allow it. There was an other Czech from Brlohy with his woman before the court, and the judge said, 'Some Czechs reject their children, yet this foreigner would give everything but they won't let him stay here.' Most of these men had to go back to Russia or Ukraine. He said he would go there since it was obvious wouldn't let him stay here. There were several of those Ukrainians. When they were on their way and met some compatriots somewhere in Slovakia, saying they were happy to be going home, the compatriots told them, 'Don't go, you will end up in Siberia. You're not going home anymore.' They turned around. [Dad] came back again. Then he was here for some time. And then in February [1948] things got wild. [The Communists] came to power. He thought they would come and take him away but he didn't want to wait for that to happen. Also, my mother told me when we met [29 years later] that he had left, so that one day people wouldn't harass me due to my father being taken away by the police. He got up and left, never said where he was going, nothing. He couldn't say that lest somebody [snitch]. So then he was in West Germany for a while. He worked with a circus. And then he left with some Ukrainians... A boat was going to Australia, so he jumped aboard."

  • "Theodor Melnik was from Ukraine. They took many of such young people. He was short and weak, so the military refused him. The Germans took them to Krumlov to the square and sold them. Landowners and private farmers would take them. The one who lived here [in Sedm Chalup], with whom [my father] lived after, said: 'The poorest and weakest one was left for me.' When [my father] worked [for them] they didn't even respect him for what he did. They put him in this shed, didn't even give him straw to sleep on or keep him warm. He was cold in there, freezing. There was no heat. He worked there, served them, doing just about everything." - "What year was it when he was brought here?" - "I don't know if it was '40 or when, but it was just before or during the war. Daddy then got together with the boys, with Vojta and Pepík, and Karel was actually still away, serving somewhere. He said suffered sleeping up there, in the cold, my grandma could relate. Even though she didn't sleep in a bed of roses, she went and knitted him some socks. How grateful he was for those knit socks! Then they gave him some blankets to cover himself. He suffered a lot here."

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    Sedm Chalup, 08.04.2025

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They promised to stay faithful under a cherry tree, then waited twenty years for each other

Marie Halgašová, 1951
Marie Halgašová, 1951
photo: Witness's archive

Marie Halgašová, née Prüherová, was born in Český Krumlov on 27 October 1947. She spent her childhood in the settlement of Sedm Chalup with her mother Julie Prüherová, grandparents and uncles. Her father was Teodor Melnik, born in 1921 in the village of Semekeniv (Semenivka) in the Lvov region of Ukraine. In 1944, the Nazis took him as an Ostarbeiter for forced labor in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and assigned to a farm in Sedm Chalup in southern Bohemia. He met Julia Prüherová and planned to marry her. Their daughter Marie was born in 1947. However, due to his nationality (Soviet Union), he was not allowed to marry and was threatened with arrest by the Soviet or Czechoslovak authorities. In 1948 he secretly fled to West Germany. He was assigned to the IRO (International Refugee Organisation) and arrived in Australia on the General Hersey in April 1950. Contact between Teodor Melnik and his family in Czechoslovakia was limited to written correspondence censored by the government in the 1950s. Julie Prüherová worked as a cleaner at the post office while daughter Marie trained as a framer at Lira in Český Krumlov. She married Petr Halgaš in 1966 and they raised three children. Julie Prüherová repeatedly applied for permission to travel to Australia to meet her partner, but was only successful in 1968 due a thaw. On arriving in Australia, she married Teodor Melnik and stayed with him. She was sentenced in absentia in Czechoslovakia to two years for leaving the country illegally. Marie was interrogated by the State Security who demanded letters with her parents. Marie did not meet her father in person until 1976, at age 29. She met her parents repeatedly in the 1980s and visited them in Australia for the first and last time in 1983. After 1989, she welcomed the fall of the communist regime but was unable to see her parents again for financial reasons. They both died in 2003, two months apart.