Olga Brzáková

* 1938

  • “The Germans left and some got their farms here, so one family got the farm near the yard. Their girl used to go to class with me, she was a nice girl. Well, they got the farm - and I, simply, how were the four parties still... I don't know, if you know how the four parties were still allowed after the war, so each party had its own parade, and I watched with horror that Mrs. Pavlíčková , I can probably say that, actually a landowner, she waved enthusiastically in the communist parade, as she probably thought that the communists had given her the farm. But a few years passed and of course they moved them out of it, took it from them and turned it into a state farm.”

  • “In the autumn, the Munich Agreement came, so my father, as a civil servant, actually moved away from the Czech authorities to the interior with his colleagues. In other words, they moved everything to Moravské Budějovice, and my mother actually stayed there with me, as a small child. They had to leave there, while it was impossible to get a car in Znojmo, so they would move their possessions, they had a furnished two-room apartment, so basically they left, the mother with the child in her arms. Fortunately, her sister was still there, so they took something in the trunk, otherwise everything stayed there. The only luck was that my mother went with me to Havlíčková Brod, or not to Havlíčková Brod, but to the village near Havlíčková Brod, where she came from, and my grandfather got a car in Havlíčková Brod, so in the end they moved their things.”

  • “So Gottwald spoke somewhere, my mother was listening to it; only that she started crying, so I immediately saw that something bad was happening, so somehow I don't really understand people who were excited at that time, but so be it. Well, why not, since my mother came from a farm... I do not know if the word kulak means anything to you. A kulak, simply a landowner, even in the Highlands, and hard work, so they were kulaks. Grandma was a kulak, probably no one pushed herself as hard as her, but she was one. My mother was the daughter of a kulak, I was the granddaughter of a kulak, so when I applied to gymnasium, I wasn't supposed to go there, because first of all they had to, it wasn't that there were any admission tests or anything like that, it was a report straight from the street. It was a declining one, because according to the teacher said, the children were not studying, so they all got bad marks - except for a son from a strongly communist family.”

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    Jihlava, 20.10.2018

    (audio)
    duration: 26:51
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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Mom left just with me in her arms

Graduation photo
Graduation photo
photo: PNS

Olga Brzáková, née Nováková, was born on February 16, 1938 in Znojmo. Her father worked as a civil servant at the regional court. When the Munich Agreement was signed in September 1938, my father had to leave Znojmo for the interior. After some time, his wife followed him with little Olga. The family settled in Jihlava. The mother came from a peasant family; their farm was confiscated during collectivization. Olga had a difficult path to education due to an inappropriate personnel profile, but eventually she was able to graduate from grammar school and pharmacy through intercession. She worked as a pharmacist in Jihlava all her life. It recalls the arrival of the Soviet occupiers in August 1968 and the events of the Velvet Revolution in Jihlava in 1989.