Factory director´s daughter must slave at cows, communists were trying to break her mother
Ilona Zimová was born on 29 September 1949 in Velké Poříčí near Hronov. Her grandfather worked as a director of the B. Spiegler & Son factory in Vienna and Hronov. Before World War II, he helped the Jewish owner to take at least some of her property out of Austria to safety. After the communist coup, her grandfather lost his position as director. His daughter, the witness´s mother, had to work hard in a cooperative farm or in a brickyard. Out of desperation she rented a farm, but as she was being forced to join the cooperative farm, she gave up farming. The witness‘s first memories are related to the currency reform, when the family lost all their money. In August 1968, the thunder of planes flying over their house announced the occupation. She and her husband used to listen to Radio Free Europe or the Voice of America and they always sided with Václav Havel and dissent. In 2022, the memoirist was living in her house in Velké Poříčí.