Jiřina Moravcová

* 1935

  • “Father then came back in 1951, it was the first or second day of Christmas holiday, and about five men in leather coats arrived to our house and they conducted a house search; I remember that they threw everything out. My school things, and everything. I felt intense hatred towards them, and so I asked them: ‘Can you tell me what you are looking for here?’ They said: ‘Well, we are looking for a radio transmitter.’ I said: ‘Fine. Go down to the basement, and there is also the attic up there, go there, you will surely find something there.’ Of course there was nothing in our house. But they arrested dad and we have not seen him anymore. Only then in the coffin.”

  • “I hated them, because it was such a terrible feeling. I loved my father immensely and I respected him, because he really was a very honest man. And it was not only me who liked him, but the people around him as well. I thus considered it terribly unjust that they were there in our house. I didn’t know why, I was thirteen. Nobody was allowed to visit us, nobody was allowed to call us, and if the phone rang, they picked it up to find out who was calling, and all the people around us then obviously became scared. The policemen were accompanying him on the street, too, when he was taking a walk, and everybody was thus afraid. Of course they were all afraid. At that time I was a student at grammar school, a second-grader, but I didn’t tell anyone at school about it, they didn’t know what was happening in our house. I myself was free to go wherever I waned and nobody watched me, I could visit friends, that was true, but nobody was coming to us. And then we moved away.”

  • “I have one terrible memory which I won’t be able to get out of my head as long as I am alive, because I experienced the air raid on Brno. It was on November 20, 1944; it was on Monday at ten o’clock in the morning, I remember all this. I was hospitalized in the Trauma Hospital, because I had had an appendectomy surgery. There was the air raid, which was horrible, because at that time it was an air raid by the Allies, and the armaments factory in Židenice got hit, as well as the city centre, including the Trauma Hospital. I could not walk and I had to lie in bed and I remember that they actually carried me out of the hospital; mom’s brother carried me in his arms, because dad was suffering from thrombosis at that time and he was bedridden and unable to walk. Then they carried me in a children’s pram over the Lužánky neighbourhood which was on fire; I still remember vividly how it was. It was quite bad. When I was then at home in Pisárky, I always felt terribly scared whenever a plane flew over. When there were some planes flying and I heard the roar, I would always crouch because I felt that bombs would fall down at any moment.”

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    Brno, 16.05.2014

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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I will carry within me what they had done to my father, even if I stayed alive until a hundred years

moravcova_jirina_portret_1954_maturita.jpg (historic)
Jiřina Moravcová
zdroj: Dobová fotografie z roku 1954 pochází z archivu pamětnice, současná fotografie byla pořízena při rozhovoru s pamětnicí

  Jiřina Moravcová was born August 6, 1935 in Brno in the family of Jan Müller, who was the financial director of one of the largest agricultural companies in Moravia, the Joint-Stock Company for the Sugar Refinery Industry (ASPC). Her mother Julie was a housewife. Thanks to her father‘s position, the family was doing quite well financially and Jiřina could thus enjoy happy childhood. ASPC continued its business operations even during the Protectorate, and the family‘s life thus did not change much during the war, at least from the perspective of little Jiřina. Julie Müllerová must have experienced fear and uncertainty when her husband Jan was imprisoned by the Gestapo in Špilberk two times. Jiřina however did not suspect anything at that time, because she thought that her father was away on a business trip. After the war Jan Müller was appointed to an important position in the directorate of the Czechoslovak Sugar Refinery Industry and he was traveling back and forth between Brno and Prague as part of his job. The life of Jan Müller‘s family became severely interrupted immediately after the coup d‘état in February 1948. ASPC was taken over by a revolutionary committee and Jan Müller lost his job. For several weeks, members of StB secret police moved in to the house where the Müllers lived and the family, including the children, became isolated for that period of time. The disaster culminated when their apartment became confiscated and they moved to the family farm in Vyškov. Jan Müller planned to work there as a farmer, but soon after he was sent to a forced labour camp in Brno for two years for political reasons. He was released from the camp after a year and a half in December 1950 due to health problems. A year later the communist power impacted the life of Jiřina and her family once again, this time even more brutally. On December 26, 1951, Jan Müller was arrested in his home, while the rest of the family could only helplessly watch. The family then did not have any information about him and they did not know what happened. Only several days later they received a brief notice of his arrest from StB in Ústí nad Labem. They didn‘t know, however, what their father was accused of and how long he would stay in prison. In July 1952 they received a single letter from their father. In September 1952 they received a notice of his death. Jan Müller died in pre-trial detention; allegedly he committed suicide. Only several years later Jiřina began to learn that her father had been charged with high treason in the process Pelikán and Co. and accused of supplying weapons to farmers in South Moravia. Soon after the whole group became sentenced, it became apparent that all these accusations were only fabricated on purpose.