Respect freedom, don’t play with it
Anna Šestáková was born in Myjava at the end of the First World War, still in Austo-Hungarian empire. She comes from a family of a tradesman and a café operator Pavel Ušiak. In addition to Anna, her father had three older sons from the first marriage . After the death of Anna’s mother, he married a second time, and this marriage gave birth to Anna’s only sister. In the early 1930s, the family moved to Košice, where Anna experienced multi-ethnicity in the reality of interwar Czechoslovakia. As a result of the Vienna arbitration, the metropolis of the East fell to Hungary and the family of Sestaks moved to Bratislava. There Anna met a Moravian engineer Ervín Šesták, whom she soon married and had three children with him. At the end of World War II, Anna had to leave Bratislava; she spent passing of the frontline in Myjava. After the communist regime came, her husband was detained and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment for subverting the republic. Anna, who was with her three children subsequently forced to move out of her apartment in Bratislava, as part of “Action B”, lived in modest proportions with a mother in law in Moravia. Ervín Šesták was released after six years of imprisonment and the spouses subsequently endured the regime’s pressure on their family together. Anna Šestáková still lives in Bratislava.
