Olga Brzáková

“In the autumn, the Munich Agreement came, so my father, as a civil servant, actually moved away from the Czech authorities to the interior with his colleagues. In other words, they moved everything to Moravské Budějovice, and my mother actually stayed there with me, as a small child. They had to leave there, while it was impossible to get a car in Znojmo, so they would move their possessions, they had a furnished two-room apartment, so basically they left, the mother with the child in her arms. Fortunately, her sister was still there, so they took something in the trunk, otherwise everything stayed there. The only luck was that my mother went with me to Havlíčková Brod, or not to Havlíčková Brod, but to the village near Havlíčková Brod, where she came from, and my grandfather got a car in Havlíčková Brod, so in the end they moved their things.”

“So Gottwald spoke somewhere, my mother was listening to it; only that she started crying, so I immediately saw that something bad was happening, so somehow I don't really understand people who were excited at that time, but so be it. Well, why not, since my mother came from a farm... I do not know if the word kulak means anything to you. A kulak, simply a landowner, even in the Highlands, and hard work, so they were kulaks. Grandma was a kulak, probably no one pushed herself as hard as her, but she was one. My mother was the daughter of a kulak, I was the granddaughter of a kulak, so when I applied to gymnasium, I wasn't supposed to go there, because first of all they had to, it wasn't that there were any admission tests or anything like that, it was a report straight from the street. It was a declining one, because according to the teacher said, the children were not studying, so they all got bad marks - except for a son from a strongly communist family.”