Miloslava Geislerová

* 1945

  • "I know they used to light candles there, at Three. But yes, then when the demonstration was on, they came at work and told us to go out, only it was freezing and we didn't leave the office. But we had candles and tricolour and everybody was like, 'Where did you get that?' I said, 'And you waited until today to say you needed tricolour? I've had it at home for a long time.'"

  • "We just lived a normal life and my dad went to work in the mines, it was a rental house, so he could buy it. And all of a sudden my mother's brother, who hadn't reached to us before then, he was a former RAF pilot, came out of nowhere, and he had been poking around for so long, I think he wanted to move in with us, that my mother started to see things differently. So when he came back, they got divorced. Nobody asked me. There were six of us, so it was quite a tragedy, I suppose. I ended up being here alone, my siblings emigrated, two of them, one died and one is no longer in contact with me, so it's just me and my husband. We made it through those fifty years, why not."

  • "I didn't know anything until about a year ago when I was doing a crossword puzzle and the answer was that the party and the government had hanged one thousand two hundred political prisoners. Do you think that's likely?"

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Olomouc, 19.07.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:29:37
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The Nazis trained people to be silent, and that was useful under communism.

Miloslava Geislerová in 2023
Miloslava Geislerová in 2023
zdroj: fotografie byla pořízena při natáčení v roce 2023

Miloslava Geislerová, née Dvořáková, was born on 21 July 1945 in Boskovice, but the family soon moved to Šternberk. Miloslava came from six siblings. The fate of the family was significantly marked by the communist regime. Miloslava‘s uncle Ferdinand Debef was one of those who left Czechoslovakia during the Second World War to fight against Nazism in the ranks of the British RAF. Ferdinand returned home after the war, but before February 1948, fearing the growing communist regime, he fled again to the West. When he returned to Czechoslovakia in 1964, he blamed his family for not being sufficiently involved in the fight against the regime. At the time, Miloslava‘s parents had divorced, and after the August 1968 occupation by Soviet troops, two of her siblings - Jana and Bronislav - emigrated. Her younger brother Přemysl was then imprisoned by the regime in psychiatric hospitals for sending a letter to the presidential office complaining about the behaviour of the Soviet soldiers. After his release in 1981, Přemysl committed suicide. The family gradually stopped communicating with each other and the siblings, living in different parts of the world, never met again. Miloslava graduated from the Sternberg Secondary School of General Education, where she graduated in 1962. During her lifetime, she had many jobs, including a worker in a textile factory in West Bohemia and a typist in a hospital in Sternberg. With her first husband Petr she raised a son David, and with her second husband Rostislav a daughter Pavla. At the time of the interview Miloslava Geislerová lived in Olomouc.