Vlasta Zdráhalová

* 1921

  • “We had a strict father; he was very strict. He did not forgive us anything. There was a scourge at home, so he beat us with it. I had so many welts on my bottom once. We had gym class; we were wearing just shorts. The teacher called me in and said, 'Gruntová, come here, what did you get those from?' I told her I got them from my dad. They invited him to the school, and they told him that beating kids does not educate them, but a name, a polite name does. And it was good."

  • “All of us went to the field. We thinned beetroot in spring and then we hoed it. It used to happen that snow was already falling on 1 November and we were standing by the piles and cutting beetroot. When I narrate it to the youths nowadays, they think that I am telling them a fairy tale. But those are facts.”

  • "When they were bombing Olomouc, the sirens went off. They warned us to go to the cellars so that we would not be upstairs. But the war did not affect us much there. We had a really good life. Some people complained. Those who did not want to work complained. And those who worked had a good life because they were well paid. And as I say, we had a good life.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Červená Voda, 05.11.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 40:20
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Dance parties were forbidden during the war, we danced to music from the gramophone in the backyard

The witness around 2000
The witness around 2000
zdroj: witness´s archive

Vlasta Zdráhalová, née Gruntová, was born on 12 December 1921 in Velká Bystřice near Olomouc. Her father, Karel Grunt, worked as a foreman in a foundry owned by Kosmos, and her mother was called Filomena. She had two younger sisters, Jarmila and Eliška. The family was financially secure and did not suffer even during the war. She finished school in 1936. She started to work in an office of the Moravia company in Mariánské údolí. Most of the people she worked with were German, and she remembers them fondly. There, she learnt to speak German well. After liberation in 1945, she married Antonín Zdráhal, who worked in a foundry in the Moravia company. She moved to Šumperk to live with him. They had two children in 1947 and 1951 and she did not go back to work after it. Her daughter married in Germany. She lived with her son in Šumperk and then moved to the St. Zdislava retirement home in Červená Voda. There she was looking forward to celebrating her 100th birthday in 2021.