Marianne Karešová

* 1931

  • “In forty-three the youth joined in the partisan resistance; eleven young students succeeded in derailing a train full of ammunition and soldiers. And there was a big fire near Arras. And those were three classmates from our school, one friend was called Marcel. He still has a street named after him in France. They were fifteen, sixteen years old; eleven of them in all. In the year forty-three, where the marketplace was, they forced us, all of us from the school had to participate in the event. They lined them all up, and the Germans shot them dead.”

  • “One day my husband did not come back, so I was curious. Dad and I went to look for my husband, and at the police they told me they had deported him to Poland for disseminating Communism in France; he was undesirable. So I had no news; I got a letter a month later, saying he was in Poland. Well, and in sixty-two my husband’s parents wrote that my husband was gravely ill, that he needed some medicine. The medicine was called Streptomycin. You couldn’t get that at all, there was only penicillin. I obtained the Streptomycin, I sent the prescriptions, so I made sure it got there. And then he said he’d like to see the children. My parents forbade it, but I packed up the children, sorted out the passports, and we were a family, so I went to my husband.”

  • “I wanted depart after a fortnight, and they forbade it, forbade it. I didn’t have the freedom to leave, and I had to stay there with the children. It was insane. I earned eighty zloty, which was about enough to buy food for one person for a month. Fortunately, my husband’s parents were kind people, good people, and they helped me so I could bring up those two children. They barred me from leaving, and I came pretty close to being put behind bars. After two years, half a year, my husband died.”

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    domov seniorů Semily, 19.02.2018

    (audio)
    duration: 47:01
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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The wounds never healed after the war

Marianne Karešová
Marianne Karešová
photo: archiv pamětnice

Marianne Karešová, previously Przybylska, was born in 1931 in Avion, France. She experienced the German occupation in her home town. In 1943 she and her classmates were forced to watch the execution of a group of partisans, which included three of her friends. She studied to be a nurse and worked at a pharmacy. In 1954 she met a Polish pianist, whom she later married. They had two children together. Her husband was a Communist, and he was deported back to Poland. He fell gravely ill, and so Marianne went to Poland with their children to look after him. Her husband died and Marianne did not receive permission to return to France. Her father-in-law helped her find a job in Czechoslovakia, where she was employed as the manager of girls’ dormitories for the Lomnice chocolate factories. She married again in the 1980s, but her husband died soon afterwards. She now lives in a care home in Semily.