"The year was 1950 and the communists decided that they should go into production, as they needed workers, as war was still a possibility, from the office... As small enterprises were just liquidated. And my husband, who had been working at an office, had to go to unload those freight cars!”
“I remember, as we got on a tram, maybe the last tram that went from Karlín to Dejvice, that there was this German soldier without insignia, a deserter. And someone on the tram said: 'Don't let him on, he has to get off!' But later they would let him get on the tram anyway.”
“That´s something I remember, as the Hungarians, as the war was getting near, it was in 1938, and the Hungarians shelled Mukachevo. We all were in shelters. They occupied Mukachevo, despite the fact that they decided it would be a part of Russia, a part of Ukraine. And in their ingenuity they established this line of demarcation on the outskirts of Mukachevo, then there was this demarcation line for about a mile, and beyond there was this cemetery. So people couldn't go to the cemetery. And this maid of our, Terka was her name, as I remember, had this father who was an undertaker, and he lived at the cemetery and she wanted to go to visit him so much. So I said that we would go to see customs officers and ask them. I spoke Hungarian, of course, and they told me: 'We would be happy to let you go to the other side, but there are Czechs over there, and they wouldn't let you in. So I thought they would let me in, as was Czech. So we would discuss this issue for a while and then we came to the conclusion that there was no way for them to know I was Czech as we would cross this one mile no man's land. What if they would shoot at us? So in the end we changed our mind. I went home and I never talked about this. As they would give me a hell of a beating.”
Jaroslava Moudříková, née Karbanová, was born in 1926 in Mukachevo, Subcarpathian Rus, Czechoslovakia. Her parents, who were of Czech origin, had a sweet shop in the town. In Mukachevo she witnessed the Hungarian occupation of the fall of 1938, and after the Second World War had started and Subcarpathian Rus had been occupied, she ventured by train to Bohemia with her mother and her siblings to the then Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. They spent a few months at her mother’s sister in Bystřice pod Hostýnem. After that, they moved to Prague in 1940, where they started a general store. The witness graduated from a trade school, yet in the end she was working for the railroad, punching perforated sheets. There she met her future husband, they married in 1948. After the communist takeover, office workers were transferred to production, which affected her husband as well. From a Czechoslovak Railway office he went to ČKD enterprise where he had been ordered to unload freight trains. The witness also attended the funeral of president Evard Beneš. Since 1956 she has been working at a food wholesale store in the former Meinl building in Vysočany. Since 1986 she has been living in Prague’s district of Vysočany. She died in the spring of 2018.
