Ilona Zimová

* 1949

  • "It was strange. As things loosened up in the sixties, my mum wanted to go to Vienna. So we asked for the promise [permission to buy foreign currency necessary for travelling to non-socialist countries, trans.]. And I don't know how it could have happened, but we did get the promise at that time. We travelled around Austria a little bit, and everywhere we stopped we were warned not to go home, that there were armies at the border and that it wouldn't end well. We didn't really believe it. We didn't believe; for one thing our grandmothers were here, all friends were here, schools. So we came back and I don't know if it was in a few days or a week, and we were really attacked. It wasn't nice because I just remember we were woken up by noise, planes were practically flying over our house, everything from Poland was flying over us to Prague, those heavy transport planes, the cargo planes actually, right."

  • "Mum was director´s daughter, so she couldn't do anything. She couldn't go to work, if she started somewhere, they made sure she quit in a while. So she couldn't get a job. For a time, she was a part-time worker in a cooperative farm. That was about the only job, because the director's daughter could only go and clean cows' asses. That was the only job, the gentlemen said it much more rudely, to make it rhyme, right. But there was simply no other work for her, so out of desperation my mother rented a farm in Červený Kostelec, eight hectares of fields, and she worked on that."

  • "You know what, maybe my first memories are those of currency [reform] and that was in '53. As children we used to count crowns and help, there used to be change scattered on the table and we rolled it up into rolls, that's what I remember. And my grandpa came from the ministry saying that there would be currency [reform], we should spend it all. He advised everybody, and he didn't spend anything himself, and he lost everything. And then I asked him if he minded, and he said no. He just sort of went over it, it´s hard to understand. He gave advice to everybody, so everybody who had money spent it. We even had, there was a safe downstairs from my grandpa's butcher shop, and it was full of matches, because there was nothing else in the shop."

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    Velké Poříčí, 03.03.2022

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Factory director´s daughter must slave at cows, communists were trying to break her mother

Sixteen-year-old  Ilona Zimová, 1965
Sixteen-year-old Ilona Zimová, 1965
zdroj: Witness´s archive

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.