Rajna Milunič Sopková

* 1945

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  • "I remember I saw Tito twice in my life. Tito had his villa in every town and he just drove through Opatija to Brijuni, which is just like an archipelago next to Pula that he owned. We as children were supposed to greet him, so we were walking with the class. The main road was just next to the marketplace, and he actually stopped the car - and just sitting next to Tito was Haile Selassie. I know I was supposed to give Haile Selassie a flower. He had a hat on with coloured feathers coming out of it, and that made a big impression on me at the time. He was so tall, neat and clean in a white uniform just like, I don't know, a general or something. They just opened the car and I gave him the bouquet so they could see me, and the kids waved the flags and that was the end of it."

  • "I remember that. We lived in a villa in Zagreb, but not alone; we only occupied the first floor. The movers came and started moving the furniture. Being a child, I had no idea what was going on, and they just moved it into the garden. It started to rain, and I remember my grandmother sent me and my sister Neva to the downstairs neighbours; and Vlado and Marta who were bigger went upstairs to the other neighbours. That's what I remember seeing as a child. Two men took the bookcase, tilted it, and all the books spilled on the floor; and they took the case outside and they left all the furniture that was upholstered in the rain. They asked my grandmother where to take it, and she said, 'Throw it all in the Sava,' which is the main river in Zagreb. Then she actually calmed down a bit, I think, and she arranged with her son Hannibal who lived in Opatija by the sea. They had like a four-room apartment, and they would lend us one room in those apartments."

  • "My father was a communist before the war; he joined the communist party at 18 and was even in prison, though I don't know how long. He felt like a communist, and my mother adopted that kind of worldview and felt like justice should follow their sort of idealistic views at the time. When the war was over, they were given this very well-deserved opportunity of a scholarship in America for two years as anti-fascist fighters, so that they could network with American doctors and at the same time scout a company that could build a penicillin plant in Serbia, because somehow my father was the deputy minister of health in Belgrade right after the war. So they decided that since my grandmother was already looking after all of us - she didn't even know I existed when they decided - that they would go to America for the two years and my grandmother agreed because she was already used to looking after us."

  • "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."

  • Full recordings
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    Praha, 12.11.2021

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    duration: 01:12:27
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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    Praha, 16.01.2024

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    duration: 01:32:19
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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    Praha, 30.01.2024

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    duration: 02:08:32
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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To an unknown country and unknown parents

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

Rajna Milunič Sopková was born in Sombor in former Yugoslavia on 8 April 1945. She grew up in Opatija in what is now Croatia. Both her parents, dyed-in-the-wool communists, worked as doctors, came from Zagreb and were active in the resistance during the war. For this, they received a two-year scholarship in the USA, and returned in 1948, but settled in Prague because of their disagreement with Josip Tito (wth the fact that Yugoslavia wanted to act independently of the Soviet Union). Their children remained in the care of their maternal grandmother. In 1956, they received permission for Rajna and her siblings to visit their parents. The memoirist completed a grammar school and a book graphic design at the UMPRUM where she also met her future husband, sculptor Jiří Sopko. With her daughter, she took part in the Národní třída march in November 1989. She knew Václav Havel and his family for more than fifty years. In 2024 she lived in Prague.