Eva Laryšová

* 1933

  • "I married a banished boy, my sister Zdena married a banished boy because who would want us, with such a tainted family history. Because many people said that it's not possible that they would have done nothing to bear this and to have come this way here [moved by force], the way we had come there. Nobody could understand it."

  • "What was their pretext? That we had been getting manure, everyone was getting manure. We had a bit of our own field where we grew potatoes. So they said, we had manure for our field, we stole the potatoes from the state farm, we couldn't have grown that many potatoes there."

  • "Dad kept going to all meetings, he was trying to persuade people saying: 'Ask the legionnaires who were to Russia how it looked there. And that's what you would want here?' But they were convinced that it has to be better than it really was. So he failed."

  • “They arrived in the morning with a truck. It was still dark. They told us what we were able to take with us, and they loaded it onto the truck. We were sitting on the truck with Zdenka and granny [mother] wanted to take some firewood above anything else, so that we would have something to keep us warm. Because of this she did not even take care about the furniture and the other things, and all this has remained there. We then always used to say that we would need this or that, but that it had been left at home. Never mind, we would bring it later. Afterwards. But it never happened.”

  • “They imprisoned him because we did not farm. My father went to work for the railway company to do various finishing works on the new railroad from Havlíčkův Brod to Brno. They came for him, they blindfolded him and they told him that they wanted to speak with him. They did a large house search in our home. They were looking for weapons. They came to us with their own hand grenade and they claimed that they had found it in our house and demanded that we tell them where we kept other weapons. My younger sister was still sleeping. She had her duvet pulled over her head and only her feet were protruding from under it. They threw the duvet away. I don’t know who they thought she was. They were searching our house for the whole day. We were not even allowed to go to the toilet. There was one woman and she always accompanied us when we needed to go. They tore out parquets from the floor and they threw out everything from the closets. People then told us that our house had been surrounded for the whole night.”

  • “I attended the grammar school together with my sister Zdena, but she later had to return home due to the law on one-classroom schools and since I was older than her, I remained there and I graduated. Our teacher for the civic education class was Silvestr Dvořák and there were only three of us girls in the class. One girl sat in the first row and the two of us sat behind her. One day the chair next to Heda was empty. Dvořák, whom we nicknamed stutterer, sat down on the desk and put his feet on the seat of the chair and he pointed to me: ‘Dobrovolná, so where did your father campaign against the agricultural cooperative this time?’ That was his start of the civic education class.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Králíky, 04.09.2018

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    délka: 02:25:34
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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    Červená Voda, 10.10.2021

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    délka: 02:06:09
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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Lost home

Eva Laryšová - 1968
Eva Laryšová - 1968
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Eva Laryšová, née Dobrovolná, was born on the 30th of January in 1933 in Žďár nad Sázavou as the eldest of three children of Jaromír and Růžena. The family owned a farm with 25 hectares of fields. During the collectivisation, they refused to join the Unified Agricultural Cooperative. The local administration set impossibly high production quota for them and when the family was not able to meet them, their machinery and cattle was confiscated. In 1953, the father was sentenced in a show trial for three years of imprisonment, all his property was confiscated and his wife and three children, now left penniles, were banished to Dolní Hedeč, a community more than a hundred kilometres away. Several months later, Eva married Antonín Laryš, whose family shared a similar fate. They also refused to join the Unified Agricultural Cooperative so the father of the family, Vojtěch Laryš, was imprisoned, his two sons were sent to serve in the army with the Auxiliary Technical Batallions and the family was banished from their home in Holešovice in the Opava area. The family used their smallholding to grow potatoes, they had decent yields but the authorities accused them of stealing them from the state farm. The court sentenced Eva’s father to two years and her husband to about year and half of imprisonment based on the claims of the local dignitaries. After Eva’s husband and father were released from prison, they got baack to their jobs at the state farm where they would meet those people who bore false testimony against them. On the New Year’s Eve of 1960, Eva’s husband died in a motorcycle accident. Eva and her then moved to Králíky and from 1964 until she retired, she worked in the local Tesla factory. The family property was not returned even after the fall of Communism. Their spacious house on the main square of Žďár nad Sázavou was torn down in 1968 and on their fields, a new neighbourhood was built between 1950 and 1960; it bore the ominous name Stalingrad.