Olga Mastníková

* 1952

  • "I graduated in 1971 and it was planned, or as promised and negotiated, that I would go to Canada to work as an au pair, and because before that I had already socialized a little with some English-speaking friends and colleagues, who came here right after the events in 1968. And the area we lived in was simply riddled with filth and entrails, so obviously someone must have been watching me, and it seems like the whole family was watching us. Well, the comrades just came and took my passport, so I didn't go anywhere."

  • "First of all, I felt it already that the father was not there, because it changed the whole functioning of the family. Suddenly, my brother was taken to my grandmother's house so that my mother could take care of it all; she had to go to work. I know I missed him terribly, that it was such a sudden sadness. They told us dad was on a business trip. Well, however, even in the first grade, when I was going, my dad was locked up. And then the teacher especially in the third grade, she acted just like the Gestapo. Well, she treated me terribly, I do not have any good memories of attenting elementary school at all."

  • "The communists locked him up after the war for all the ´honours´ he achieved during the liberation, because he actually went from Russia with Freedom - he went with the whole army through Dukla and the Slovak National Uprising, and I think they experienced hell there. And then, because he didn't want to join the party, they locked him up, and since they couldn't always find a cause, a reason, somehow to catch him redhanded, they slipped an anti-state poem into his jacket, then they searched there and locked him up based on that."

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    Praha, 07.12.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 22:06
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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There was a terrible sadness when dad suddenly wasn’t there

Olga Mastníková in 1972
Olga Mastníková in 1972
photo: archiv pamětnice

Olga Mastníková, née Bernklauová, was born on July 27, 1952 in Pardubice. Her father, Josef Bernklau, fought during the Second World War on the Eastern Front and participated in the Carpathian-Dukel operation. In 1957, he was arrested for an anti-state poem and imprisoned for several months. Olga Mastníková had problems with her studies because of the personnel report. After the death of her father, her mother remarried to war veteran Zdenek Stav. In the 1970s, Olga Mastníková worked in the Czechoslovak press office, and after being pressured to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), she preferred to get married and go to maternity leave. After the revolution, she was engaged in business. In 2023, she lived in Prague.