Olga Tichá

"The year before there was a terrible drought; that summer was so terribly dry there were no crops at all. There was nothing to feed the cattle, so they had to kill the animals. The winter came, with it a threat of famine, and the government bought food abroad. They ran out of money terribly and decided to solve it by imposing the 'millionaires' tax'. This meant that anyone who had assets of more than a million had to to pay the tax, depending on the size of their assets. It was due in June 1948. My father had a tax provision for that in the bank, but that was taken from him in February, so he had nothing to pay the tax with. He was left with his debt. The communist comrades took only assets that were worth anything and left the debt behind. Some people were losing out terribly. The fact that we couldn't pay the millionaires' tax dragged on with my father until I was an adult; they kept deducting one third of his pay to cover that..."

"Within an hour one day, everything changed; it was the 25th of February 1948. The communist government declared nationalisation that day, and the very next morning my father had to hand over the keys, and nothing was ours anymore. They took away our papers, cash, valuables, and they came to us looting, as it was called looting: patrol of secret police officers armed to their teeth, and they rummaged through everything, threw things out from the furniture, looking for valuables, and when they found any, they took them. It was terribly unpleasant, especially for my mother who was carrying it on her shoulders. We had a big household, and some employees ate with us. They could have retired but they didn't receive any pension because they hadn't make any payments; it wasn't compulsory then, so they were without income, and they didn't have anyone at home to take care of their household, so they ate with us..."

“Mom thus did various illegal odd jobs to make ends meet and it was all very difficult for her. Now, when I reflect on it, I don’t understand how she was able to survive it. She had to cope with so much injustice. Even before the nationalization when we had the factory here, everyone here greeted us with respect. Even me, a three-year-old girl. After nationalization of the factory, people were hiding behind their gates. They did not dare not to greet us, they were ashamed. And they were afraid to greet us. And my mom had to live in this. Dad was going to work and he had his friends and acquaintances there but my mom did not. She lost all friends, and all people feared her. She did not have anything. She was very lonely and in a very difficult situation. There were people who were helping her, but they mostly did it in secret.”

“Originally we were to be evicted to the forests in the Kokořín region, to a gamekeeper’s lodge in a remote place. My mom went to see it there, because she had been informed where they wanted to evict us. The way it was done was that a truck or a wagon arrived and they loaded whatever the people quickly managed to pack and whatever just fitted in there. Then they carried them somewhere but the people did not have a clue where they were driving them. People who were inconvenient to the regime and who were called ‘enemies of the people’ were being moved in this way. Mom thus found out that they wanted to relocate us to that gamekeeper’s lodge and she found out that from there it was two kilometres uphill to reach the nearest village which had drinkable water and electricity. There was a well by the gamekeeper’s lodge, but they had thrown in Germans there during the war and the water was not drinkable. There was nothing there, only a deserted old gamekeeper’s lodge. We would have to walk two kilometres to a bus stop in order to get to school. Grandma was old and dad had to go to work. Mom was afraid of this a lot.”

“Gift-giving for children used to be done in the factory on St. Nicholas day. Children of employees and children from the street gathered there, they recited some poems and sang songs, and then they received some presents – bags with fruits and sweets. This continued even after the factory became nationalized, and so I came there as well and I sang the folk song Okolo Suče voděnka teče (Water Flows Around Suč). And they kicked me out! And it had an unpleasant consequence: the production manager, a great communist, declared that they should have done away with us just like they had done in Russia. That they should have made us stand against the wall and shoot us. I was about four years old. I was sitting on the staircase there and crying and I was afraid to go home, because I still felt that I was to blame for everything. That if I said about this at home, I would get a beating, because I was the one who caused it that they wanted to make us stand against the wall. It was perhaps because I had sung that song, or I didn’t know why. I did not explain this to myself in any way, I just felt that everything was my fault. This feeling accompanied me throughout my entire childhood – that I was to blame for what the family was going through.”