Karla Lierová

* 1950

  • “Granddad, as a farmer, I’m so sorry how it went, they pushed him to join the co-op. You know how it was, the circumstances. He didn’t want to do it, not by any means, he fought so much, for his little fields. We had a cow, but they put a knife to his throat. His son, Mum’s brother, was studying a distance course in agriculture at the university. He was about to graduate, so they called him in and said that if he didn’t sign it, there’d be no graduation. The poor man had been commuting from Olomouc to Prague for that course for five years, nerves a wreck, his family also paid for it. So finally Granddad signed it, and the next day they took everything from him. Everything. And when they were about to take the cow, he fled. Just imagine that the cow, as it was passing through the gates, it knelt down and refused to carry on. We were there, so I remember that.”

  • “And when we went to visit my sister in the maternity ward, we saw those Russian convoys pass through Hradiště, where the main Malinovsky Street was. It was awful. And you can imagine, all our people with their hands up, shouting: ‘Go home,’ and the like. This one officer, he shot into the air and people calmed down, everyone was afraid. Well, and that’s how it was. It was, I don’t know, another three four days that we’d go visit Pavla in hospital in the afternoon, and then she came back home with little Mareček. Well, and life went on like with anyone else.”

  • “Well, and one evening a man rang or knocked at their door, asking to borrow some matches, that he wanted a smoke. So they gave him the matches, well, and come morning, a haystack had burnt down. And that was it. High treason. And yet they didn’t even know what or how. She got, I’m not sure how many, twelve years maybe, and her brother got 18 or 25, and they could’ve even gotten the death penalty for high treason. They took their old dad too, and gave the house to someone completely different. They put some Communist family there, and they let the mum stay in a single room next to the stables. Their dad couldn’t take it, in prison, he fell ill, so they let him go home. Well, and a gate fell on him within a week. So he died.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Uherské Hradiště, 07.03.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:32:24
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Man should be man to man

Graduation photo, 1969
Graduation photo, 1969
zdroj: archives of the witness

Karla Lierová was born on 29 June 1950 in a brewery in Kyjov. Her father, Karel, was a renowned brewer. Her grandfather from her mother’s side, Antonín Hnilica, owned a large farm. When the Communists came to power, the family suffered from persecutions because Antonín Hnilica refused to join the local united agricultural cooperative (UAC). Karla’s older sister Pavla was not allowed to attend secondary school, and her father was fired from his post as head brewer. Karla enrolled at the Secondary School of Education in Kroměříž in the 1960s, when the situation in society had generally relaxed. After graduating in 1969, she underwent political screenings and began working as a pre-school teacher in Hluk. Five years later she was appointed headmistress of the nursery school in Traplice, where she remained until her retirement in 2011. Her headmistress’s career required her to make numerous compromises with the ruling regime. But Karla never joined the Communist Party. A close friend of her mother, Marie Cichrová, was sentenced to 18 years in prison in the 1950s for charges that included providing lodging to the guide and courier agent Štěpán Gavenda (with her brother Jožka). Karla Lierová is thus one of the last witnesses of this story.