Natálie Mikušková

* 1947

  • "I had to go among the first-graders and the kids didn't take to me very well. When I went to school in the morning, they were hiding behind bushes and rocks after me. So I went to school crying at first, sulking. One time they pushed me into the creek. They just wouldn't accept me. I was a little different, I spoke differently. They wouldn't accept me. But then I picked myself up, and I gave it back to them, and then I had friends."

  • "I had a two-year-old child at the time and my husband's mother came running to us and hurriedly told us to go buy bread. But it was nowhere to be found. There is a little pond in Broumov and my sister and her family were there at that time. It was August, it was warm. So my husband took a detour, through the fields, so that he wouldn't meet the tanks, so he went there to take them home, because it was getting close. So just fear, chaos. We didn't know what was going on in Broumov. Just the big politics was going on in Prague at that time."

  • "There were Hungarians there before, who did not treat the population very well. They even left a charge in that oven where they baked bread. And my brother as a little kid went to play there and dug it up and my mother discovered it before it flooded, otherwise they would have been blown up."

  • "Dad was with Svoboda's army, but you know how the Svoboda men were treated there, badly, they were threatened with ending up in the gulag, not to be glorified, it was bad. Dad reached the Republic with Svoboda's army. He was wounded in the Dukla pass and got to the hospital."

  • "We had a cow, she fed us, and there was a saltbush growing, it all boiled, and some soups, so we survived. I was saved by the help that came from America. I had meningitis at the age of two, and penicillin from the West, which somehow got there, helped me."

  • "In the 1960s, my father got the idea to visit his friend Ludvík Svoboda in Prague. He took me with him. He was the Minister of the Interior at the time, he shook my hand, he gave me priority at the door as a thirteen-year-old girl, and I was absolutely ecstatic. Ludvík Svoboda asked: 'So what do you want, Vasil?´, my father was Vasil. "What do you need? His comrades in arms came to see him regularly and everyone needed something."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Broumov, 25.02.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 25:42
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Velké Poříčí, 19.07.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:09:19
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

It took her ten years to get out of the Soviet Union to see her father.

Natálie Mikušková at boarding school
Natálie Mikušková at boarding school
zdroj: Archive of a witness

Natalia Mikušková was born on August 10, 1947 in the town of Kaliny in Transcarpathian Ukraine, which belonged to the Soviet Union. Her father joined Svoboda‘s army during World War II and remained in Czechoslovakia after the war. Natálie Mikušková lived with her mother and two siblings in Kalina in a timbered cottage until 1957, when they managed to leave for Broumov region to visit her father. She spoke Ruthenian and the children at school did not accept her at first. In 1960, her father took her to meet Ludvík Svoboda. She trained as a saleswoman and later completed her high school diploma while working at Veba. She married and had children. In 2023 she lived in Broumov.