Rajna Milunič Sopková

* 1945

  • "We walked along the waterfront and I know we were absolutely thrilled with how the crowd just got bigger and bigger. So, Nora and I, the youngest, we marched together on to the National. And suddenly the red berets appeared and the atmosphere began to thicken and suddenly there was a scream. Nora was about twelve at the time, and she cried and said she was scared. And we went home and I knew that my eldest daughter was still in the crowd, she was teaching at the time. And now I heard on the radio that there was beating there, and I was much afraid that she got into trouble. And in fact, after a while, the eldest daughter came with other classmates from the pedagogical one and they said that they barely escaped, that they started beating them there."

  • "I was born on the Hungarian border because it was the end of the war, but Zagreb, where my parents worked, has not yet been liberated. So, they waited a few weeks until that Zagreb was liberated to come home to their grandmother, who was taking care of the three other, older siblings. They saw each other after a long time, all through the war they just didn't see each other, and after a long time they came, and of course my siblings didn't know them because they didn't remember them. And they pushed me into a room and didn't tell my grandmother that they had a fourth child. So Grandma was upset because she had something to do with the three during the war. And then she had to come to terms with it, and then as an adult she always remembered it and apologized to me."

  • "It must have been pretty hard for Grandma. After that year or two, I don't know exactly, Grandma, she managed to get an apartment opposite. So, we moved out and then we had a three-room apartment with a garden. Because the parents couldn't send any money, it seemed complicated. And we actually lived on Grandma's pension. And Grandma sometimes sold something, I don't know, we had silver candlesticks or something that she sold from time to time. And otherwise, we lived terribly modestly, because she had to feed five people from her pension, it was hard, but otherwise we as a child did quite well."

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    Praha, 12.11.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 01:12:26
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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To an unknown country for unknown parents

Rajna Milunič Sopková in archive photography
Rajna Milunič Sopková in archive photography
photo: Archiv Rajny Sopkové

Rajna Milunič Sopková was born on April 8, 1945 in the town of Sombor in the former Yugoslavia. She grew up in Opatija on the territory of today’s Croatia. Both of her parents worked as doctors, came from Zagreb and worked in the resistance during the war. For this work they received a two-year scholarship in the USA, they returned in 1948, but due to disagreement with the politic of Josip Tito, they decided to settle in Prague. In 1956, they received permission for Rajna and her siblings to come to see their parents. In Prague, the witness graduated from grammar school and book graphics at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, where she also met her future husband, artist and sculptor Jiří Sopek. In November 1989, she and her daughter took part in a parade on Národní třída. She had known Václav Havel and his family for more than fifty years. In 2021 she lived in Prague.