Jaroslava Mrázová

* 1935

  • “Mum was very conservative. We lived in Dvořisko, where we had a farm. She tended to us and to the farm. Seeing that Dad was often away on business outside of Choceň, she acted as his deputy or representative. So she was in charge of both the farm and us. So compared to before, when we lived in Lhoty, the situation was very different to when we were in Dvořisko, which is four kilometres away from Choceň, and we had to walk, so that was a fundamental difference. So Mum had other duties as well, of course, in the social sphere, because of the nursery school. Then she was in the dairy cooperative. So she was very active. I remember that she really didn’t know what to do first. And so, when my brother said she enjoyed baking and doing things in the kitchen, she didn’t get round to the kitchen any more, she didn’t have the time. I only saw my parents in the evenings, after work. That’s what I wanted to specify, that the situation before the war - or, this was also before the war, except those were the thirties, when my siblings were at the age for elementary school, and this was when I was in my primary school years, which was the difference of ten years, which affected our whole life style or way of life.”

  • “The work continued as normal, as far as the wartime conditions allowed, both in Slovakia and in Bohemia, in Choceň. There’s not much to say about that. They prospered, people were employed, they were very glad to be employed. I remember how they visited Mum especially, asking for someone else to be hired, and Mum thought it wasn’t possible to keep expanding more and more, but she always put in a word, so people liked Mum a lot. During the war, that is, then everything changed. Then that year forty-five came and everything changed. So back in forty-five Dad first... they celebrated the end of the war, but it was only just 16 May when they came to arrest him. They came to lock him up in a very humiliating way: they came to the factory, took his braces - because people wore braces back then, they took his shoelaces, and they led him through the town like a criminal, so people said when they saw it they cried in the streets. Then Dad was in prison. Then they placed the factory under national administration. And I remember that, I was a little girl and we lived in Dvořisko, I used to walk by the factory on my way to school, so I walked, which was reasonable back then, all us children walked to school, even though it was almost four kilometres away; so we walked to school in the morning, and then back home, which was great. There was a big signpost on the factory: ‘Entry denied to all members of the Mráz family.’ I used to stop by because they’d have a bun or something for me in the gatehouse, silly things like that, so I used to stop by. So Dad was locked in Choceň at first, then in Vysoké Mýto. Then [my] sister returned from England, and she got him out of the prison somehow... which was a whole story of its own, because there was an old tower there, and they’d actually put Dad inside it, and my sister got him out of there because some of her former classmates had returned as well, I don’t know, from the Russian front I guess, or in some such way, and so Dad was back in Dvořisko, and he had to report [to the authorities] each day.”

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    Praha, byt pamětnice, 25.09.2017

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In difficult times I was encouraged by the memory of my parents

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zdroj: Archív pamětnice

Jaroslava Mrázová was born on 14 March 1935 in Choceň, as the third child of a prominent Czech businessman. Jaroslav Mráz specialised in the production of refrigeration technologies, but he soon expanded into the aviation sector as well. This led to the establishment of a company called Ing. Pavel Beneš and Ing. Jaroslav Mráz, Choceň Aeroplane Factory. By joining forces with the experienced aviation designer Beneš, her father entered the exclusive ranks of the few Czech aeroplane manufacturers, where he gained a prominent position. When the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was declared, the company was forced to switch to military production - again specialising in aviation. Fortunately, the machines it produced were neither fighters nor bombers but instead relatively harmless planes, like the two-seater glider Kranich or the courier plane Storch. It could be said that the factory was much more important to Czechs than to Germans, as it provided a livelihood to many people in the area, and in critical times also a „way out“ for people in danger of being assigned to forced labour in the Reich. Although Jaroslav Mráz was branded a „bourgeois exploiter“, his youngest daughter Jaroslava succeeded in graduating from the Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague. She was awarded the title of ak. arch. (Academic Architect), and she worked in her field of expertise for the whole of her professional career.