Olga Vitvarová

* 1936

  • "And then I was there when they came to arrest my uncle. The secretary of the National Committee and a member of the SNB (the National Security Corps) came for him, and he was in overalls because we were working at the threshing machine. I used to go there on holiday to help. They took him away just as he was, in overalls. He never came back. Not forever. There was a trial. We were at the court in Charles Square, where we saw him for the first time in a long time. His hands were chained like he was a murderer. They led him on some kind of strap, and then he was sentenced. We thought we'd at least say goodbye to him. When the sentence was passed, they took him away, and we weren't allowed to see him again. After that, we were always looking for his whereabouts. We found him in Vrbětice, where he was working in some mines. When I was 14, they sent me to him with food. We always tried to help him somehow, so my mother made some cutlets or parcels for me to take there. But I was told that he was no longer there, so we searched again until we learned that he was in the mines in Jáchymov."

  • "I was very happy when the Prague spring came because we were, I must say, living in poverty. The two of us as teachers. We had the minimum, the children were in kindergarten, and our salary had to be used to calculate a meal allowance of about 50 halíř [cents]. The headmistress wondered how our salaries might have been so low. We had low salaries because we were both teachers. My colleagues had it better because their husbands were not teachers. They were workers or craftsmen or other professions, so they didn't have such poverty. We had poverty for several years, and the Prague Spring was really liberating for me because Mr. Císař was the Minister of Education, and he gave each teacher a 500 crowns raise."

  • "His eldest son, my cousin, is also Zdeněk, who wanted to study. He was a great learner, but he was not allowed to study, so he went to a mechanical engineering apprenticeship. But he was always bullied and harassed because of his father, who was in prison. So he decided to emigrate. That was in April 1955. He was visiting us. He promised to be my best man at my wedding. I didn't notice anything about him, that I was seeing him for the last time. He left a letter, and soon afterward, my parents, terrified, came to our house to tell us that Zdeněk had emigrated. The search began, and to this day, we don't know how it ended."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Zvole u Prahy, 18.04.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:22:05
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

In 1955, he left a letter saying he was emigrating and has been missing ever since

Olga Vitvarová, 1955
Olga Vitvarová, 1955
zdroj: witness

Olga Vitvarová, née Šafránková, was born on 26 September 1936 into the family of architect Jaroslav Šafránek. She spent her childhood and youth in Zvole near Prague, where her parents settled after marriage, and her father built a house there. Olga‘s mother came from Černuc u Velvar, where dramatic events took place in the 1950s that tragically affected the whole family. Uncle Zdeněk Hudeček refused to join the unified agricultural cooperative (JZD). He was arrested and imprisoned, and the rest of the family was moved by the communists to a dilapidated house in Výčap u Čáslavi where they could take only the bare necessities with them. In 1955, Olga‘s nineteen-year-old cousin Zdeněk Hudeček secretly decided to emigrate, but he remained missing forever. It was not until after the 1989 revolution that the family was able to search for him and discovered that he had probably not crossed the border. Olga Vitvarová was not admitted to the UMPRUM (Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague). She graduated from medical school and, after completing the pedagogical minimum, began teaching at an elementary school. Later, she completed her education for a degree in Czech language and art education and also taught in middle school. Her husband was also a teacher, and together they raised two daughters, Iva and Lenka. The older one was affected by Down‘s syndrome. The Vitvars lived in Týnec nad Sázavou for 20 years and in Zvole since the 1980s. In her narrative, Olga recounts her experiences during the war in Zvole and describes the conditions in the education system at that time and her resistance to pressure to join the Communist Party. In 2023 she lived in Zvole.