Anna Poláková

* 1930

  • "The worst was when we were sitting on the train and the bombs started to fall. The planes were coming, they were flying in groups like that. I can still hear the terrible roar today. And the bombs were falling, the train stopped in a field. "Zahorie - flat as a palm, there was nowhere to hide. We ran out of that train, we screamed, we cried. I screamed, oh, mother, I'm dead! Once I found a big shrapnel from that bomb near me, it was sharp as a sword. When I brought it home, my parents were speechless. I certainly wouldn't have survived that if it had hit me."

  • "You know what? I believed it. We know they made a lot of mistakes, but we, as I mentioned before, it's our environment, poor childhood, unemployment, all of that. And now all of a sudden we had jobs, beautiful housing, everything. So for those reasons, too, one believed it."

  • "When there was Mobilization in the thirty-eighth year, he was enlisted in Komárno, I remember that. It was so terrible. At his brother's we were cleaning corn and we didn't have a radio. A neighbor came and told us that something like that had happened. And in the morning they had to go. We walked them out, we were all crying, we didn't know how it was going to end, how long it was going to last. And then after some time, father came crying. They were in that Komarno and there people were crying, begging them to help them so that they didn't have to leave there, to save them. They had weapons, they had equipment, but it was impossible. That was the arrangement of the powers and they had to vacate those places, which were then taken over by Hungary."

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    Partizánske, 10.08.2020

    (audio)
    duration: 01:34:23
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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The worst was when we were sitting on the train and the bombs came

Anna Poláková in 1944
Anna Poláková in 1944
photo: Archiv pamětnice

Anna Poláková, née Hajzochová, was born on 29 November 1930 in Hochšteten (since 1948 Vysoká pri Morave) in the Bratislava region. She attended primary school in Hochšteten from 1937. At the end of September 1938, her father Stefan enlisted as part of the general mobilization of the Czechoslovak Republic. In 1942, Anna Poláková started attending grammar school in Záhorská Ves. She commuted there by train and during her travels she repeatedly witnessed bombings. After the Second World War - at the end of August 1945 - she entered the Bata boarding school of labour in Batovany (today’s Partizánske). Immediately after the February 1948 coup, she joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, where she remained until the Velvet Revolution. She successfully graduated from the Bata School of Labour in 1949 and then worked at the 29 August Works, the nationalised Bata factories. She remained an employee of the shoe factory until her retirement in 1989. At the time of the interview (2020) she lived in Partizánské.