Emílie Milerová

* 1936

  • “I watched it for about 25 seconds and then couldn’t go on.” – “Your husband probably wouldn’t be happy with it…” – “Definitely not. The Chinese people are completely different. It all jumps, no one does it by hand like back then. The themes are poor. They make short work of it. My husband used to work on the screenplay for as long as a year. He made fifty films. And it was one frame after another, drawn precisely and in detail. My daughter still has these screenplays, it’s something beautiful. Then he handed it in to the workers at the Animated movies who knew exactly what to do and how. He supervised it each week. He had his well-trained animators. They did an amazing job. It’s all incredibly laborious. My husband was very precise and would return the work if was a little sloppy. That’s why everything was tip top. When he was doing a floral background, for example, I thought I’d have a coronary. It was in the summer. Six-meter background and one flower next to each other. He worked on it for six months. And I always said: ‘Come on, let’s go for a swim’, and he said he couldn’t, that he had to work. Then I asked him how long the strip would be in the movie and he said that three seconds.”

  • “He has a pure open heart, is at the kids’ level and is friendly and optimistic. That’s what children need. And he’s funny too. That’s how my husband was. He was like the Mole. Completely ingenuous. He looked at everything with the eyes of a three-year-old kid. I took this over from him. We were together for 54 years. Well and now I’ve paid for it.”

  • “What were your hobbies, what did you want to become?” – “I wanted to be an artist but 1951 was the worst year for decision-making. Pionýr (Pioneer) had been founded but I didn’t join – I had already been a member of Junák and Sokol. That was enough for me not to get accepted into school. I thought the inspector was going to kill me when I told him I wanted to be a costume designer. He said that no one needed costume designers, that there was class struggle and people had to work. So I got into a school of chemistry.”

  • “My father had a hernia and had have an operation in the General Hospital in Prague. My mother and I were terrified. I had a sister who was ten years older than me. We were frightened and were waiting for something terrible to happen. One day dad was dismissed from the hospital and his stomach was all infected. He took a tram but then had to walk about five kilometers home. After the operation. He came home, lay down and then we saw an aircraft squadron. The hospital was completely bombed-out. My dad missed it by half a day. I remember clearly how my mum wanted to look at his wound to treat it. She was a herbalist. My father took off his trousers and he had about twelve stitches there, six on each side. As he straightened up, pus gushed out from the stitches. He went weak in the knees and had to lie down. My mum treated him and got him out of it.”

  • “Every time when we killed a pig and finished eating it, I would always get hungry at four p.m. and my mother would cut me a piece of this disgusting bread and spread some jam on it. I thought I’d go mad, I couldn’t eat it. And everything was rationed. Our mum was so amazing that she walked fifteen kilometers to the baker, all the way to Jesenice. It’s called Na Kocandě, there used to be a miller there and he sold rationed loaves of bread. My mum used to walk there and back, carrying those two loaves of bread. Fifteen kilometers. Once, when she had almost made it home, she fell down. She had been so exhausted that she fell. On her forehead. So we both cried over it. We had a tweezer at home and I had to pick out the little stones out of her forehead and she had a really low pain threshold so she cried a lot. And she was left with this fine grain there forever.”

  • “We had two neighbors here, they were State Security agents and when a dissident came to our garden on a Sunday, my husband would be hauled over the coals on Monday already. The general manager would dress him down and we had to pay up because we had had a million debts on the house…” – “Were you in touch with dissidents?” – “Yes, a lot. Ivan and Helena Klímovi lived right next to us, Vaculík used to come here, Kohout, Ivan Klíma’s brother and this whole crew. But then, when Ivan was persecuted, he closed up and didn’t want to see us anymore because he was afraid it would do us harm.” – “Did you attend home lectures?” – “I used to go to the readings at Klímovi. What went on there? People met and read what they had written. But later we got too afraid to go. The pressure was so big… Of course I had been invited to a house theatre play for example but I didn’t dare go. The times were so terrible, it really wasn’t worth it. We had small children, I was at home, no money. My husband was with the Animated movies and it was really tough then.”

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    Praha, 10.01.2020

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They said no one needed a costume designer. That there was class struggle and people had to work

Emílie, graduation picture
Emílie, graduation picture
zdroj: pamětnice

Emílie Milerová was born April 11, 1936 in Modřany near Prague to Helena and Václav Dlouhý. Both her parents came from poor families, her father was a bricklayer, her mother a lacemaker and embroiderer – she handled wealthy people’s clothes. Emílie had a sister who was ten years older than her and came from her father’s first marriage. She passed the war in Modřany with her parents. She remembers the May Uprising fights and the role of the Vlasov army in the liberation of Modřany. In 1950 she applied to study costume design but didn’t get a good reference – probably because she had refused to join the Pionýr (Pioneer). She completed a secondary school of chemistry but in the end didn’t devote herself to chemistry due to medical reasons and instead started working as laboratory technician in a hospital after studying at a school of medicine for two years. In 1959 she married the artist and animated movies director Zdeněk Miler whose children’s films are known by kids all around the world. She was a housewife for the following twenty-five years, raising two daughters and taking care of her overworked husband and also her granddaughter Karolína who lived at her grandparents from the age of fourteen. Milerovi were engaged in the dissent and were followed by the State Security. In 1982 her elder daughter Kateřina emigrated to Switzerland and returned back home after the revolution. From 1985 Emílie worked as a secretary at the Regional Institute of National Health but she retired after the institute had disintegrated in 1989. In her sixties she dedicated herself to her long-ago passion – painting. In 2001 her husband got infected with Lyme disease and his state of health began to deteriorate. He died in 2011. As of the time of the shooting, there have been ongoing civil litigations regarding the copyright to the work of her deceased husband.