Hana Pavelková

* 1930

  • "I remember that there were about seven of those partisans or how they were called, somewhere in the church in Prague. It was still under the reign of Germany. My uncle was with the fire department and had to go to the church to drown the partisans. They shot themselves down, so they wouldn't be caught.… I remember that. It was somewhere in Prague in a church. That's where we went to watch. They preferred to shoot themselves, the poor ones, so that the Germans would not get them."

  • "When they were arresting him, when all the neighbors were being arrested, Dad said, 'Mom, I'll be the last one.' And he was the last one. Nobody else." "In what year was he arrested?" - "In 1942. I just brought him lunch to Bílá hora, but I had already met him on the sidewalk, the SS officers had already taken him. And the SS officers went home to my mother. Mom said they were pretty decent. They just looked at the apartment and said that it was not possible that we lived like this. My dad was arrested on June 24 and executed on June 30. And then my mother…" - "And you did not see him in the meantime?" - "No, we haven't seen him anymore, because they locked him up in Kobylisy and he was executed in six days."

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    Praha, 06.03.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 01:24:46
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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I didn’t know that it was the last day when I saw my father

Hana Pavelková during the filming
Hana Pavelková during the filming
photo: Post Bellum filming

Hana Pavelková was born on May 19, 1930 in the family of locksmith František Mandys in Řepy. She spent her childhood in poverty, three out of the nine siblings survived and often suffered from hunger. Her father joined the resistance movement during the war, together with Josef Líkař and Václav Řehák they produced explosives for the resistance organization Defense of the Nation. He was arrested and then all of them were executed at the Kobylisy shooting range. However, neither Hana Pavelková nor her mother knew almost anything about her father’s resistance activities. After the war, she completed her basic education and she worked as a shopping assistant in a bakery. She got married in 1947 and soon had two sons. She worked as a cleaner in a research institute, later as a shopping assistant in a canteen and in the consumer cooperative Včela.