We couldn’t even pick a cherry from our own garden
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Jaroslava Králíková, née Marečková, was born on 14 June 1925 in Sluhy near Prague in a farm. Her father Jaroslav Mareček was a farmer, her mother Rozálie, née Sklenářová, was a housewife. She had a younger sister. The family was deeply religious and strongly rooted in the Catholic tradition. Jaroslava Králíková entered the school in Sluhy in 1931 and later attended the town school in Kostelec. She was deeply affected by the death of President Masaryk in 1937, who was then perceived as the moral authority of the nation. During the occupation in 1939 she witnessed the arrival of German soldiers. The war did not touch their village directly and the family did not suffer from poverty thanks to having the farm. In 1945, she witnessed the arrival of Soviet soldiers, two of whom stayed in their home. After the war, she studied for a year at the housekeeping school in Šluknov. She witnessed the post-war looting and displacement of the German population. In 1946 she married Václav Králík from Brloh, a landowner related to the family of President Edvard Beneš - his mother was the sister-in-law of Beneš’s brother Vojtěch. The Králíks had one son, Jiří. In 1946 the National Committee assigned two German prisoners of war to work on their farm. After February 1948 they were persecuted - they were called “Beneš´s supporters”, and in 1950 the communists confiscated their farm, including animals, stock and garden. Václav Králík refused to join a cooperative farm (JZD), but in order to stay living on the farm, he accepted a job as a horse groomer. Not long afterwards, however, he left the cooperative farm and got a job at the mine in Pecínov, where he worked as a foreman, then was forced to work in the construction industry. It was only when Jaroslava Králíková registered for permanent residence in Prague and escaped the influence of the officials in Sluhy that she got a job in Prague, at the Avia company, where she worked until her retirement, among other things as an accountant, storekeeper and cook. She retired in the 1980s. At the time of recording, in 2025, she was living in Mratín.
