Vlasta Najmanová

* 1939

  • "I just remember from the kitchen leaning back, because it was low, my dad was tall, he was leaning back, just against the door frames and looking at me and I was dancing and I called it 'prisjadka'. I had a little chair in there so I used to sort of bounce around and I used to sit down and I used to do that with my feet and I used to say I was doing 'prisjadka'. Because you get that from the Russian ones, don't you." - "What does 'prisjadka' mean?" - "Well, have you ever seen not dancing, but rejoicing, in Russian, like soldiers? How they do, you call it 'kazachok'." - "Yeah, how they throw out the legs." - "But they call it 'prisjadka'."

  • "Because it was commune, everybody worked and everybody got paid the same. They just built a club there and there was, first of all, like a cinema was shown there, and secondly there was a bakery, so they baked bread and everything. Cooking was done there, that was cooked together and those who worked in the field or in the garden, there were also vegetables, potatoes and I don't know what all. And they also built stables right there, so there were horses, cows. So everybody that worked there, they would go there and there was a big canteen, that was built in the front too, and they would all go there to eat. They didn't have anything at home. There was no shop, then there was some shop, but that was brought in, again the cooperative brought that in. Like some cloth and stuff. And when they went there, they had to make a commitment that they would bring everything for four years, that they wouldn't ask anything from the company that took them there, that they would be independent. So they had to have clothes and everything for the children and so on in advance."

  • "First they just made a hole and they made a dugout and they just covered it and they just had these walls, it was warm there, they survived the winter there. Well, and then in the spring they started again, so they made these sort of holes again, and the holes were primarily for them to have these children that they brought in, so that the children would have sort of schools there. They were in those holes, so the witnd didn't blow too much on them, and they put some of those benches or something in there, so they taught them. And the teachers went with them too."

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Every beginning is hard, no matter where you are

Vlasta Najmanová, 2024
Vlasta Najmanová, 2024
zdroj: Post Bellum

Vlasta Najmanová was born on February 4, 1939, to her mother Marie, née Brumková, and her father Václav Šára in the settlement of Reflektor on the Bolshoy Uzen River near the city of Saratov in the Soviet Union (USSR). Her parents‘ families arrived in commune, later a cooperative called Reflektor, in 1925 and 1926 to start a new life in the harsh steppe and help build communism. They worked hard, building the village from scratch, but in the 1930s, they were affected by the Soviet regime‘s repressions. In February 1938, Leopold Brumek, Vlasta Najmanová‘s uncle, was arrested, falsely accused of espionage, and sentenced to eight years in a gulag. He died in the Bulatovo labor camp on the exact day Vlasta was born, unable to withstand the harsh conditions and inhumane treatment. In 1941, Vlasta’s father left to fight with Svoboda‘s army alongside Soviet soldiers against the Germans, but he died in Poland. After the war, the family decided to return home, and in 1950, they arrived by train in Svinov, near Ostrava. Her mother had to support three children and her parents, who were not granted pensions for the years they had worked in the USSR. Vlasta Najmanová graduated from secondary medical school and began working as a midwife in a hospital. In 1962, she married Karel Najman, who had also spent his childhood in Reflektor. They raised two children together, a daughter Jiřina and a son Václav. The family moved to Nové Strašecí, where she first worked in a nursery and later, until 1994, in a hospital in Kladno. As of 2024, she lived in Nové Strašecí.