As a girl, I was sent for a salami roll that cost 2,500 CZK
Stáhnout obrázek
Helena Chrástková, née Stašová, was born on 8 August 1939 in Moravská Nová Ves. She remembers how as a child she experienced bombing, hiding on potatoes in a neighbour‘s cellar, and the liberation of the village by the Red Army, when all the women hid from the soldiers. After the war, the family moved to Břeclav, where Helena started primary school. The currency reform in 1953 affected the family marginally. Helena Chrástková remembers that a loaf of salami cost 2 500 CZK at that time. After studying at a higher school of economics, she started working first at the district health institute and then at the district industrial enterprise. Shortly after her marriage, in 1959, she and her husband moved to Mikulov, where there was a strong German and Jewish minority. As the couple could not find their own housing in the town, they moved to Kaplice in southern Bohemia, where their daughter Hana was born and where they experienced the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. In response to the occupation, Helena Chrástková‘s husband resigned from the Communist Party and was dismissed from his position as deputy on the local state farm. The family returned to Mikulov in 1972, where daughter Hana graduated from the secondary agricultural school because she was not allowed to study at the pedagogical school due to a cadre assessment. In 2025, Helena Chrástková and her husband lived in the same apartment in Mikulov where they had moved in 1972.
