MUDr. Hana Procházková

* 1928

  • “When I finished the school, my daughter was born already during studies and husband was in the army. And we were being placed, we could not choose ourselves. And I got placed in Františkovy spa. I said: ,I will simply not go there, as I got my parents in Prague and a year-old child they can take care of to let me finish my studies.‘ They did not take me seriously at all, but I did not start my job in the spa town. So they punished me later, let me stay at home for half a year and then, as there was no maternity leave for a year or two, as it is nowadays, back then it was just twenty weeks, four of which you had to take already before giving birth and sixteen weeks, that makes four months after birth, so there were many kinds of mischief around it to and women worked until the last moment before birth. And I worked at the department of infectious icterus.“

  • “And in November my granny had to hand it over, as they ordered her to give such impossibly high ratios she could just not fulfil so she had to give it away voluntarily. And then it belonged to the state estate Prague, all this around here. We only had an advantage, that my granny handed it over voluntarily and they let us stay upstairs. But in the ground floor there were the feeders, who provided food for the cattle, there were around twenty cows and several horses, so they lived downstairs. They also took the garden and we could keep three lines of trees. That was an unpleasant period indeed.“

  • “You cannot imagine those feeders. So I put two geraniums here. And in the morning they were ripped out. Or they just unmounted the fuses in the barn and we had no electricity. As they had four or five children, they built here a kind of... ground floor house with a bathroom and toilet and a roof, which ended right under our windows and the children were crawling on the roof and beating in our windows on the first floor. So that was the kind of things and they were all sitting out as we walked past them or went out, they were just sitting outside making jokes about us. That was really unpleasant.“

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    zahrada u usedlosti Bulovka, 11.05.2017

    (audio)
    duration: 01:35:20
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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We were lower rank people

Hana Procházková
Hana Procházková
photo: Pamět Národa - Archiv

Hana Procházková, née Součková, was born on 21 June, 1928 in Prague. She attended the medical faculty. Her husband, Vratislav Procházka, was an architect and came from the family owning a wine estate called Bulovka in Košíře for over a hundred years. Following the onset of the communist regime the mother of Vratislav Procházka, Anastázie Procházková, kept the enterprise running. Similarly to other farmers she was also obliged to give ratios to agricultural cooperative. Obligatory ratios were so demanding and impossible to fulfil. Therefore in 1950 Anastázie Procházková “voluntarily” handed over the Bulovka to the state agricultural coop. The family was allowed to keep living there under limited conditions. The state care caused the estate to gradually devastate until it was almost ruined to bits. Therefore it was transferred into the ownership of ČSTV and in 1976 an Equestrian Club was established training horses also for the purposes of the Czech film. After 1989 the estate was given back to the family, but only in a limited manner, as the restitution were not applied to gymnasiums. Only at the beginning of 2017 the Procházka family managed to purchase back the rest of the house.