We should have lined your family up against a wall and shot like in Russia.

Stáhnout obrázek
Olga Tichá, née Fraňková, was born in Mělník on 17 March 1945 into the family of factory owner František Franěk and his wife Marie. She had two elder brothers. The family lived in Dolní Beřkovice. František Franěk built a leather goods factory in Dolní Beřkovice. It employed a hundred people, so the communists seized it among the first right after 25 February 1948. They deliberately separated the family by sending František Franěk to work in Velké Meziříčí, allowing him to only come back home for Sundays. Marie Fraňková, her three children and her sick mother-in-law were evicted to a barren apartment in a dilapidated Beřkovice mansion. The family was left destitute. They were not entitled to food stamps and the father‘s salary was reduced by Gottwald‘s ‚millionaires‘ tax‘. The only job the mother was offered was cleaning the toilets at their former factory. Olga Tichá faced humiliation and bullying in school because of her bourgeois background. She also endured difficulties at home because her mother became emotionally unstable under the weight of their situation and vented on her daughter. For political reasons, the witness was not allowed to apply for a high school with a certificate. Eventually she managed to get into a secondary horticultural school in Děčín thanks to nepotism and a forged report. She was involved in a serious accident in 1964 and lost both her legs. She coped with it and worked at Sempra after graduation. She started a family and raised four children. After the revolution in 1989, the family regained the factory through privatisation, but they were unable to maintain production. Olga Tichá lived in Dolní Beřkovice in 2022.