Marie Žváčková

* 1945

  • „We had a horse. I'm photographed with him, sitting on him. They took the horse from us. I cried terribly. What happened? At that time, my mother did not want to go to the collective farm and they came to her with the lie that it had already been signed by Mrázek, Jarmara, the neighbours around our field. So they scammed her. My mother said: 'I'm sorry that Mrázek didn't say anything about it...' So she signed it although they didn't even have an application for the collective at all. So they scammed her like that. So she was terribly unhappy about it. Then, in the end, because fields were being merged, they took it from them and threatened my mother that they would give her a field somewhere near Štíty at the border. Well, it wasn't a good time. Then they took the cattle from the barn. For a few crowns. It wasn't even money, and they took the horse, too.“

  • „My husband’s sister went to study to become a seamstress in Prostějov. But as they found that out, they gave the order to release her from school and that she had to join the collective. So they received a letter that she was released and that she must be a member of the collective farm. He had just received the letter and he [father-in-law] opened the gate and that Finger guy was just passing by on his bike. If it hadn't happened at that moment, he would have calmed down a little. So he grabbed and punched him. In the evening Finger went to the theatre and they say he had a broken jaw, but in the evening he was in the theatre, so it couldn't be that bad. Then my father went to dry the hay on the meadow and they came there for him and they didn't let him go, they took him to prison, to the investigation room. All this for a stupid slap. And all the property ... We had to pay half of the house here so we wouldn't have to pay rent.“

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Chromeč, 07.04.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:06:02
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Chromeč, 28.04.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 26:53
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Native furrows in breadth and beyond, I loved you so much

Marie Žváčková in 1965
Marie Žváčková in 1965
zdroj: Witness's archive

Marie Žváčková was born on March 18, 1945 in Jedlí in the Zábřežsko region to parents Jiří and Berta Pospíšilová. During World War II, the Nazis publicly executed her uncle Jan Filip for joining the resistance. After the communist regime began, her mother was fraudulently forced to join a unified agricultural cooperative in 1957. For a change, the communists expropriated her fathers machines in the workshop, and he had to end his cooperative trade. After basic education, they did not give Maria much of a choice and sent her out to study agriculture. Immediately after her studies at the agricultural apprenticeship school, she joined the collective farm in Jedlí at the age of fifteen. She then worked as a worker, assistant zootechnician and tractor driver. In November 1965, she married Alois Žváček and a few months later she and her husband moved to his birth house in Chromč. His father, Jaroslav Žváček, was turned into a “kulak” during the collectivization, and after a conflict with the chairman of the Communist Party in Chromč, he was sentenced to four years in prison and confiscation of all property. He spent two years and eight months in various prisons before being released on a large amnesty by the President of the Republic in May 1962. However, his untreated diabetes deteriorated during his imprisonment, and on August 16, 1965, he died of kidney failure at the age of only 51. In Chromč, the Žváčeks raised their three children: Jaroslav, Miroslav and Šárka. Marie Žváčková worked in the local collective farm before retiring due to worn-out intervertebral discs. At he time of filming in 2022, she still lived in Chromč.