Marie Vladyková

* 1948

  • "When I didn't get expelled during the years, graduation season came, and I wasn't supposed to graduate. I came to the final exams. I had finished all my subjects, and the last one was mathematics, but they wouldn't let me answer. Not at all. They let me get ready, and then I had to answer. I had the 'set theory' question, but they said that was enough, and that was it. So, like, I didn't pass my final exam. At the final exam, we went alphabetically and had to come dressed in the Youth Union uniform. One girl went in plain clothes. She had an orange dress. My name was Černá, and her name started with a 'D', so I went before. The chairman of the exam committee told the girl in plain clothes that she must be Černá since she wasn't in the Union uniform. She said no, and that I was Černá, and I was in the Union uniform. So they came after me. My parents knew I would end up the way I did. My mom was waiting for me in the hallway at school when the exam results were announced. How I ended up... I wasn't even 18 yet. My mom took me away from that school. Then, when I was looking for a job after school, I was to take a resit exam, and they didn't want to give me a job anywhere. Wherever I applied, they wouldn't take me. Eventually, the state farms would take me to work in the fields."

  • "They were basically evicted to a pigsty. There were horses under them. There were ducks in the place they were supposed to move into. It looked terrible in there. My mom and dad used to go and clean it up so my grandparents could move in. It was 1953. Mom's sister was pregnant, and so she couldn't help. Then I used to go there with my parents to see my grandmother, and I remember they had two small low rooms. My grandfather was quite tall, and it was already a problem for him to walk through the door. More peasants got evicted there."

  • "The husbands were not allowed to be together in the shop, so they drove my father to work in the mines. For example, there was another butcher's shop where the lady stayed in the shop, and the man went to sell at the butcher's shop in Slaný. There was also, for example, a hardware store. The gentleman went to work in Slaný, and the lady stayed in the shop. And so it should have been with our father, but he was sharp and didn't want to take it lying down. Mom was always rather afraid that we would be destroyed and liquidated. She had already experienced a lot. But Dad told them he wasn't going anywhere, so he didn't go to the mines. He insisted on staying here. But they didn't employ my mother. She didn't get paid. She wasn't an employee, even though she worked with Dad in the shop. First, the butcher shop was under Pramen, and then Jednota took it over."

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    Zlonice, 18.08.2023

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The Communists drove my grandparents into a barn, took away my father‘s butcher shop, and I wasn‘t supposed to graduate

Marie Vladyková, 1963
Marie Vladyková, 1963
zdroj: witness

Marie Vladyková, née Černá, was born on 19 July 1948 in Zlonice into the family of Čeněk Černý and Marie, née Hornická. Her maternal relatives have roots in Zlonice that are said to go back 400 years. Her father and grandfather were local butchers, and her maternal grandparents had a farm there. Marie grew up with her brother, two years older than her, Čeňek. In 1953, the communists ruthlessly expropriated her grandparents‘ farm and evicted them from Zlonice to two small rooms of an outbuilding in Blahotice, which had served as pigsties until then. A little later, they took away the butcher‘s shop from her parents, which they had in their own house on the square. Her father was supposed to go to work in the mines, but he fought to stay and sell in the shop that was taken over by the consumer cooperative Pramen and then Jednota. His wife continued to work with him in the shop but did not receive a salary. Both Marie and her brother Čeněk graduated from primary school with honors. Čeněk was not allowed to apply to a high school and was supposed to become a bricklayer, but thanks to the intervention of a friend, he got an apprenticeship as an electrician, and later, while working, he graduated from secondary industrial school. Thanks to the best results in the entrance exams, Marie got into high school, but she was not supposed to graduate. She got disqualified from the mathematics examination without any reason. She graduated on appeal after the reexamination. Because of her cadre materials, they would not employ her anywhere except on a state farm, where she was offered a job in the fields. Thanks to an acquaintance, she found employment in an office in a construction company in Zlonice, which did not please the communists from the national committee, and they sought her dismissal. Over the years, Marie graduated from a secondary school of economics while working as an accountant. She tells how she lived through the main events of 1968 in Zlonice. In the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, she lived with her husband in Hovorčovice. In 1995, she moved to her family home in Zlonice, where she continued to live in 2023.