Anna Mertová

* 1939

  • “In ’53 we had to join the collective farm because they had put a lot of pressure on the farmers. We were not labeled kulaks; those who were had to deliver great supplies but were robbed of their machinery so that they couldn’t cultivate their land. But then the pressure on my parents increased as well. We also had to hand in large supplies. We even bought eggs from other people in order to meet the quota because whoever didn’t meet it went to prison. And they even locked up farmers during the summer. So, it wasn’t easy at all. My dad worked for the Committee. He was respected in the village. But still, no one wanted to join the collective farm, and so they pressured him a lot. Once they called him in to the court, the building is horrifying to this day. He was there all day, and when he left, he went and signed it. Us kids, we never learned what they had told him there back then. But when he signed to join the collective farm, all the others joined too. At first, we had all the animals and everything at home, but then they started collecting it. That was something terrible for the farmers, seeing their cows being taken away. My eldest brother loved horses, it was his hobby. When they took them away, it was really hard for him.”

  • “My youngest brother Tonda studied in Olomouc to become a priest, but then they took over the monasteries and he was interned in Broumov and then came home. He was then called for military service, to join the technical auxiliary battalions. They built the airport in Sliač. After about three years they were released. Then he looked for a job. He worked as a conductor on freight trains, then as a medic in a hospital. That’s where he met his wife-to-be, who worked there as a nurse and who had originally also wanted to join a convent. After their wedding, they moved to Brno, had a son and that son is now a priest.”

  • “There were dive bombers. What a roar it was when they approached the city. There was this hill between us and the city Znojmo, and my elder siblings would go there to watch Znojmo being bombed. We had to draw all the curtains, there had to be no light whatsoever, so that they wouldn’t target us too. There were inspections, checking whether no light showed through. The dive bombers were terrible. What a roar.”

  • “My eldest brother was a forced laborer. I don’t know if he was ever in Germany, but at the end of the war he was in some factory in Austria. In 1945, in the winter, he and his friend ran away and came home. They had to hide in our attic until the end of the war. It was life or death for all of us. If someone had given us away, my parents would have surely suffered the consequences too. But they made it through until the end of the war. His friend was called Juránek.”

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    Jeseník, 07.07.2020

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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When I imagine that my parents lived through two world wars and then Communism, what did they get out of life?

Anna Mertová in 2020
Anna Mertová in 2020
zdroj: Post Bellum

Anna Mertová, née Hlávková, was born March 14, 1939 in Kuchařovice. The large family of 12 owned a farmstead there, with 15 hectares of land. During the war, her eldest brother Jan escaped from forced labor and hid in the attic of their house for several weeks. After February 1948, the family was forced to join a collective farm (JZD). They had to hand in large supplies of agricultural commodities. Despite that, they held out. They only joined the JZD in 1953, after their father had undergone a daylong interrogation with the State Security in Znojmo. Another brother of the witness, Antonín Hlávka, decided to serve God and joined the capuchin order in Olomouc, which made the deeply religious family justly proud. However, he was interned in the Broumov monastery in April 1950 together with other monks during the so-called Operation K. After returning home, he was sent to the technical auxiliary battalions, which served the regime as a source of cheap work force, to be “re-educated” as a politically inconvenient person. After graduating from a gymnasium in Znojmo, Anna started working as an accountant in a ROH (Revolutionary Trade Union Movement) sanatorium in Ramzová, a mountain town in the Jeseník region, where she worked for five years. There she also met her husband-to-be Stanislav Merta. They got married in 1959 and moved to nearby Nové Losiny, where their son Stanislav and daughters Marta and Jana were born between 1962 and 1967. As of 2020, she still lives in Nové Losiny.