Eva Horová

* 1943

  • "Someone always had to choose a place, because you can't camp in Holland. Holland is flat, there are no forests. So, we always found someone who knew someone who knew something. In Austria, someone knew a parish priest in a village where the parish had a piece of meadow near the forest and a stream flowed there. It was agreed that the parish priest would lend us the meadow. The advanced group went first, they borrowed scythes to mow the meadow. At the local sawmill they gave us some scraps to build the floor of our tents. We had our own tents, we saved up for that. We even got a minibus, we called it Lochneska. So, the advance group drove Lochneska, built a field kitchen, got decking, then the little kids arrived and the little kids got the hammer and nails and they pitched a tent. Make your beds. If you make a crappy bed, you won't sleep well. Each group had to take care of food for the day. Therefore, they had to have a menu the day before, they had to think about what to buy in order to cook enough food. There used to be thirty-five to forty of us at the camp. When the flag was lowered at the end of the day, the team's assessment was to evaluate how it went with the food. The highest mark was: It was edible! Our children have grown up, and there were no new teenagers between the ages of ten and fifteen. There were no more emigrants in Holland. It was slowly dying, dying, until we decided to stop the activity."

  • "And the farewell when we said goodbye to my parents in Jindřišská and went to Wilson station. My mother was looking out from the window at us, we lived on the second floor, and my mother said: 'The children will not be Czechs! Peta will not be Czech!' And I: 'He will and He will!' We remained a Czech family. Czech is spoken at home, both children speak Czech. Our son earns a living by interpreting, translating, as a court interpreter from Czech to Dutch. And our grandson, his son, is now in Prague and learning Czech. When I visit my mother at the Olšany Cemetery, I say to her: 'Mom, you have Czech grandchildren.'"

  • "We didn't see anything in Dobrín, that's a small village near Roudnice, and Jirka said: 'We're going to Prague and we leave the country!' Because he had Moscow in his head in 1964. That was his experience. I sat by the radio and cried and cried because I thought that the world couldn't let it happen. The world can't let it happen, that tanks will come to a country that did not do anything to anyone. And no one says anything, no one helps us. That was terrible helplessness. So, we went to Prague. We never had passports because we were unreliable, so we couldn't go abroad. I still don't know how my husband managed it. He left, came back and had passports and exit clauses. [...] We said goodbye to my parents, took the child, a baby buggy, two suitcases and took the train to Linz. We went through Růžová street from Jindřišská street to Wilson railway station and we went to Linz. And we became refugees.'

  • "Right after the war in 1945, they appointed a national administrator in my grandfather's company, who wasted all the money that my grandfather had in the company. In 1948, the Revolutionary Guards [meaning the People's Militia] came and put people in front of the gates. Our family also had a house there, and my grandfather and grandmothers lived there. And move out, until tomorrow! Everybody. It's all our now. My mom asked, she planted roses in the garden, if she could take them. They told her: 'The roses are yours, but the soil is ours and you must not step on it!' I got that from my mother. She kept diaries, I have cupboards full of my mother's diaries. And now there were us: great-grandmother, grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, me and my brother. Seven. And we needed somewhere to live. They found us an apartment in Jindřišská street right next to the tower on the second floor, and we all moved and lived there."

  • Full recordings
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    Praha, 03.05.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 01:52:14
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 2

    Praha, 12.05.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 01:26:37
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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I remind my mother in Olšany that she has Czech children

Eva Horová, Oustworn laboratory, r. 1973
Eva Horová, Oustworn laboratory, r. 1973
photo: archive of the witness

Eva Horová, née Pěčková, was born on October 24, 1943 in Prague. Her grandfather started a business in the early twenties and later became a co-owner of the Bratří Bouřové company. After the end of the Second World War, he was accused of collaboration, then imprisoned for a short time, but the court acquitted him of guilt. After February 1948, the family’s property was confiscated and they were evicted from Vokovice. The witness went to an eleven-years school in Karlín and after graduation, because she was not allowed to study at a university due to political background, she worked as a laboratory assistant and studied remotely. She got married at the beginning of the 1960s, and after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, they emigrated to the Netherlands in 1968 via Austria and London. After the expiration of the departure clause, they were sentenced in absentia for unauthorized leaving the republic, and the sentence was later excused as part of a pardon. From the mid-seventies, the witness was involved in the Czechoslovak exile scouting organization in the Netherlands. In 1985, also thanks to her merit, a partnership agreement was concluded between the towns of Brielle and Havlíčkův Brod, which continues to this day. Later, they moved with their family to The Hague, and after 1990 she worked as a project manager of several years of environmental cooperation between the Province of South Holland and the North Bohemian Association of Municipalities (SESO). Internships, conferences and professional exchange meetings took place. At the time of filming, she continued to live with her husband in The Hague, Holland (May 2022).