We lost everything
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Ludmila Holubová, née Kroulíková, was born on 23 July 1942 in Litomyšl as the middle of three sisters. Her father, Otakar Kroulík, came from an old farmers family that for generations farmed a farm in Zálší near Vysoké Mýto. The Kroulíks lost their farm during collectivisation, in 1953 their farm was nationalised in the so-called “Kulak Action”, and both her father and mother were arrested and tried, but eventually got off with sentences of several months. At the same time, the family had to move from Zálší to the village of Žabčice near Židlochovice in South Moravia. They then moved to Doudleby in southern Bohemia, where Ludmila completed primary school, and afterwards graduated from the secondary agricultural school in Hořice in Podkrkonoší. She was repeatedly not admitted to the agricultural college for cadre reasons. From 1960 she worked on a farm in Kostelec nad Orlicí. In 1963 she met a teacher, Jaromír Holub, they started a family, moved to Prague and raised three sons. At the end of the 1960s, the witness graduated from the pedagogical faculty in Prague, after completing her distance studies. She started teaching at the primary school in Ďáblice, where she worked until her retirement. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the family tried to regain the farm in Zálší. This was not achieved until 1997, unfortunately the Kroulík parents did not live to see it. In 2021, Ludmila Holubová and her husband were living in Prague, and she preferred to spend her time on the farm in Zálší.
