Irena Luxová

* 1940

  • “It was a big farm with barns and a yard. We got thirteen hectares to go with it; they rationed those out. Agriculture Minister [Julius] Ďuriš gave those out by decree. Everyone got thirteen hectares, even if they had a smaller cottage. Everyone got equal, but it was necessary to tend to fields that didn’t belong to anyone. I know we had about twenty hectares because the rest was forced tenancy. We had to tend to them so the fields wouldn’t lie fallow. It was mandated.”

  • “They vented themselves on the Germans and tormented them. There’s a special place behind the graveyard. I know that the land there couldn’t be cultivated even under Communism. No one knew about it back then. It wasn’t in the graveyard but right behind the fence. They said four Germans were chosen from the village, and they had to dig their own grave before being shot. That’s the place where they’re buried. It wasn’t just in Horní Lipka, but in Mladkov as well, say, where they have a stone memorial. The same thing happened there. They shot some Germans there.”

  • “I then enrolled at a grammar school, but I had to stop after half a year, at the midterms, and go work in the fields because Mum didn’t go to work. She had little children to look after and couldn’t go to work. We had signed a big field off to the co-op, and Dad worked in the co-op on his own. So I had to go work in the fields. I ended school at the age of fourteen, so I wasn’t even fifteen yet and I had to go work in the UAC.”

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    Králíky, 27.08.2018

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    duration: 01:48:07
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When I was fourteen I had to go work in the agro-cooperative

Irena Suchomelová (Luxová) - 1953
Irena Suchomelová (Luxová) - 1953
photo: archiv pamětnice

Irena Luxová, née Suchomelová, was born on 26 May 1940 in Líšnice near Ústí nad Orlicí. In May 1946 the family moved to Horní Lipky in the foothills of Králický Sněžník. They availed themselves of the opportunity to resettle the estates confiscated from the original German inhabitants by a presidential decree. They tended to their farm in private before voluntarily joining the newly established united agricultural cooperative (UAC). Irena had to abandon her studies at an eleven-year grammar school and take up employment in the plant cultivation section of the UAC. She worked in the cooperative and later at the Králíky State Farm until her retirement. She remembers that they had a diverse group of employees of various nationalities and also the members of various displaced “kulak” families or the monks interned in the nearby monastery on Mother of God Mountain. In 2018 she lived with her husband in the town of Králíky.