Milada Kavičková

* 1936

  • "They told her she had two weeks or some short time to move out. It was a written order that was brought by, we called him the Policeman, he was a kind of a delivery man from the national committee. So my mother went to the national committee and asked the chairman, Krejčiřík, to tell her where she should go after moving out. And he told her, 'Either you find something, or if you don't, we'll call a truck, you load your most essential things there, it will take you to the borderland and drop you off at the village square, there are many houses available, you can choose which one you like.'"

  • "During the time they kept those young bulls there, the manager of that large farm came and told my mother and sister that they had to clean out the barn, which of course was done every year. Mother said, 'We can't do it by ourselves, you have to send someone to take care of the bulls, because we can't do it,' and my sister when she saw all this, she was quite impudent, and she said to him, 'Please, how dare you treat us like this? We are two women, and you know how the bulls are, and you still tell us to do it?’ And he said to her, 'I am the director of the farm and I didn’t have to study for it. And you visit the night school, so you will be expelled.'"

  • "So I came to the school, the principal wasn't there, there was a teacher’s office, and I said that I don't have a recommendation and that I would really like to go to that school. And so they gave me a paper, they told me to fill it out and go to the school in Bedihošť, which I just finished, and they told me that the principal has to sign it. So I went home and biked to Bedihošť. The janitor told me: 'They all went to a pub'. It was the first of September. So I went to the pub, it was right around the corner, and that guy, Blažek, was sitting there, he was my former class teacher and the current director of the school. He was a heavy smoker and the guys were drinking beer, and so I came to him and asked him, in 1951 we didn't have to call everyone comrade yet, so i was begging him: 'Principal Blažek, please, I would really like to go to that farming school, they gave me this paper for you to sign.' And he said: 'No, I won't sign anything.'"

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    Ostrava, 25.06.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 02:44:01
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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There were posters around the city for my fathers trial

Milada Kavičková in 2022
Milada Kavičková in 2022
photo: the photography was made during a shooting in 2022

Milada Kavičková was born on May 18, 1936 in Prostějov, into a family of farmers from a village nearby called Hrubčice - her parents were František and Marie Hošek. Her father, as a village wealthy man, was convicted to 4 years in prison in 1955 in a public process and the communist persecution due to the collectivization of agriculture continued with other members of the family. In 1953 Milada had to be adopted by her great-uncle dr. Ladislav Roháček. After her husband’s conviction and incarceration, Milada’s mother was violently evicted and forced to hard labor at a state-owned farm. Due to those circumstances, both of Milada’s sisters, Svatava and Marie, emigrated in the 60s. Even though Milada was forced by the communist regime to work in agriculture, she dedicated her professional life to biochemical laboratories - she was a laboratory technician. She raised two children, Marie and Antonín, together with her husband Antonín Kavička, who was known for his conflict with the regime during his highschool years, which was followed by an expulsion of the whole class in the last year of high school. In the time of the interview Milada Kavičková lived in Orlová in the Moravian-Silesian region.