Milena Kročáková

* 1954

  • „There was this guy who had been to the U. S. and who knew that we were doing the Indian stuff and he brought us a book. It was in English, though. We managed to find a translator with some effort. She lived at the Národní Street so we always made an appointment and went to pay for a part of the translation. Then, at home, we were assembling forty carbon copies for forty people to get them. On the 17th of November, we went to pick another translation and we saw the paddy wagons at the Máj department store. We thought that something was going on there. We picked the translation, paid for it and went our way and when we got to the street, the cops were already walking towards us. We thought something might happen and we had no clue what might be going on. We passed the Máj department store from the back side, on the other pavement. We got home without having the slightest idea about the events and then we saw what was going on hundred metres away. We could have get beaten as well.“

  • „It was supposed to be a so-called ‚Night of Magic‘. It was one such event. A friend of ours had been abroad and learned how to hypnotise. But [the news of the event] leaked out and they came to pick me at home. My mom was going crazy because she disagreed with me going out with the tramps. So I excused myself from work and went to Vršovice to Míčánky [police station]. And then we were questioned. We had agreed that we would snitch on each other and tell that we don’t know the others [Milada’s husband is joining in]. But the truth is, there was someone called Houla but I didn’t know his real name. They probably wanted to find out whether I would want to cooperate with them [as an informer].

  • „Two years after I had started the job, a young woman from Moravia started working there, she immediately joined the Socialist Youth Union and her starting salary was two thousand more, in those days. When I had started, I had twelve hundred. Then I got several raises, I even had quarterly bonuses. The company was doing well. Or, I don’t know whether it was really doing well or whether it was decided from above that it would do well but there were quarterly bonuses so sometimes, I got even two and half thousands when there were yearly bonuses. But she got two thousands more for being politically active.”

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    Myslkov, 16.06.2022

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Living with a tribe of reliable people was an important experience

Milena Kročáková in the 1980's
Milena Kročáková in the 1980's
zdroj: pamětnicee

Milena Kročáková, née Jakešová, was born on the 19th of September in 1954 in Prague to the family of Vladimír and Vlasta Jakeš. She was a single child. Her parents disagreed with the Communist régime but they did not participate in any activities against it. Her father worked a blue collar job in the municipal transport company, her mother was on disability support. They would go to their cottage in Mnichovice and they liked to travel, both within Czechoslovakia and to the countries of the Eastern Bloc. In 1965, they made a car trip to the USSR. At the time of the August invasion of the Warsaw Pact Armies, Milena was 14 and she was in a summer camp. Milena graduated from a business academy in Prague and she met her future husband, Ladislav Kročák there. Both of them loved tramping and they shared an interest in Indian [i. e. Native American] culture. In 1978, they got married and started a family. Since the seventies, they would go to tramp trips and reunions, for which the Public Security [police] checked them frequently [as a means of harassing]. Gradually, they joined a subculture of “Indian” hobbyists who made themselves Indian clothes, tools, artifacts, organised camping with teepees and lived as an Indian tribe. In 1992, Canadian filmmakers shot a documentary about them. Milena Kročáková worked as a clerk in the Ferona company. After the 1989 revolution, she and her husband started their business – they were able to use their experience in making custom Indian clothing and other artifacts even for foreign markets. In 1996, they visited America. In the last few years, they mostly concentrate on drum making and drumming workshops.