Milena Tesařová

* 1936

  • "That Russia under the Tsars, under Lenin, under Stalin, now under Putin, it thinks it's a superpower. They are a superpower, but that they want to include, I don't know, maybe half of Europe, that's the worst. I almost think that's worse than Nazism, I don't know."

  • "We had terribly strict vetting that everyone, not just party members, had to go to interviews. The main question was whether we agreed with the entry of troops. I said no, and I was worried sick to see what would come of it, but nothing came of it. I retired in 1990. In the '90s they released the cadre assessment materials here and this interested me terribly. So, I went to pick it up, and strangely enough the committee I was interviewed by, although the cadre officer here was the chairman of the committee, but there were two ladies there that I normally talked to, so I guess they made sure that I had it written down that I had three small children at the time and that I didn't have time to do politics at all."

  • "But when we walked into the woods, we got about halfway there, and the grandmothers needed to rest for a while. So, we sat down, and two planes flew over us. Then we continued on, and when we came to the edge of the woods, the place where we were sitting before, they started bombing it or shooting on it, I don't know what, and we were already in the woods. That's what my mother told me afterwards, that I knelt down by the meter of wood that was stacked there, and I knelt down and I prayed ‘My guardian angel’, what a fear I had. I remember the war very much like that."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Brno, 02.02.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:05:12
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - JMK REG ED
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    Brno, 19.02.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:02:30
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - JMK REG ED
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What is talked about at home I must not say elsewhere

Milena Tesařová, seniors' photo, 1956
Milena Tesařová, seniors' photo, 1956
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Milena Tesařová was born on 2 December 1936 in Brno to parents Milada and Vladimír Němec. Her father, Prof. Vladimír Němec, was condemned for resistance activities during the World War II and executed in Mauthausen on 7 May 1942. She herself witnessed the Gestapo search of her home, the bombing and other events connected with the end of the war in Brno and its surroundings. The family was distantly related to paratrooper Karel Svoboda, who was one of the original members of the Anthropoid group. After the war, her mother remarried to Ing. Ivan Korolkov, a refugee from Bolshevik Russia, a widower who had a son, Petr, from his first marriage. After 1948 she had problems with the street committee‘s assessment but managed to graduate from the Building Industry School in Brno in 1956. In 1960 she married Oldřich Tesař and they had a daughter Dana (1962) and twins Vladimír and Ivan (1966). She lived through the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 in Brno and during the vetting process in the 1970s she clearly opposed the occupation. She worked as a project architect at the Railway Construction company in Brno. She trained in Sokol, was a scout since childhood and was actively involved in the revival of Junák in 1968 and after 1990. She took part in several demonstrations in 1989 and in May 1990 in the first Scout assembly in Prague. After the death of her husband, she lives alone in Brno and devotes herself to her grandchildren and the history of her family (2022).