Alice Uhlářová

* 1958

  • „But they were there. Those blokes would go there, the bigwigs, all sorts of them. For example, that madman, I hated him to the guts, Mamula. He was a Party secretary from Ostrava and he was a big name but I don’t know what he was doing. And I know that whenever something like that was going on, so, for example, food was placed into Petri dishes for twenty-four hours to check whether it was not adulterated or whether something was nod added. Or when that Štrougal was there, someone from the staff had to drink a glass of that juniper brandy that they had as an apéritif, to check that it had not been poisoned.“

  • “And I see it like it happened yesterday, we went with dad, and he was mowing the grass for the rabbits, he would always teach me how to mow. And for eight years, I took part in a scythe mowing competition at Soláň. And we came home and mom would go to the neighbour for fresh milk and she said: ‘There will be war.’ I told her: ‘Mom, are you crazy?’ And it was just after the Russians stormed in here, so I know that my brother and my mom, they went by car, they went to buy flour, you see. And all sorts of things so that one could have bread. And I remember that we were trying to buy various paints, and lime, and here, there was… At that time, there was not that motorway to Slovakia but there was a main road to Slovakia here and I remember as if it was today, how my brother and his buddies wrote ‘Ivan, idi domoy!’ Or how they turned the street signs the other way, instead of Prague, it was turned back. And I know that mom repeated: ‘This is our end.’ And it’s true that it was like that. One wouldn’t have guessed that it might take so long. And nobody would have believed that the Russians would be like this, that they would occupy us.”

  • Anděla was married, her husband was one Arnošt, and this Arnošt was – would you guess where he worked? They lived in Ostrava and he worked in [Ostrava-] Zábřeh in hospital and he would bring, for the partisans, here to Bečva and to this Martiňák, he brought various bandages, medications, from that hospital. He brought everything he could, nowadays I would say that he stoled it, took it away, but he simply brought it here and they would take it to Martiňák. On foot or on a cart. And there’s another story then, one day, they brought some things and they hid them here at Nová, in a pub at Prostřední Bečva, and there were arrests and that was it. The Germans were making rounds. So, imagine, they had to, there is a weir nearby, Bečva, the river flows, and they had to put it all in a suitcase, they weighted it with stones and put it to that weir.”

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    Prostřední Bečva, 11.03.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 02:03:10
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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I tasted the apéritif for Prime Minister Štrougal

Božena Kubáňová, aunt of Alice Uhlářová, WWII resistance member. 1940's
Božena Kubáňová, aunt of Alice Uhlářová, WWII resistance member. 1940's
photo: Soukromý archiv Alice Uhlářové

Alice Uhlářová was born on the 7th of August in 1958 in Ostrava-Zábřeh. Like four generations before her, she found her calling in gastronomy. Her grandmother Amálie Kubáňová, along with her siblings Rudolf, Josef, Vladimír and Božena at the Martiňák chalet in the Beskydy Mountains not far from Horní Bečva. The whole family was active in the anti-Nazi resistance and Rudolf, Josef, Vladimír and Božena paid the highest price. Alice apprenticed as a cook and a waitress and she worked in this field for long years. In the 1980’s, she worked as a waitress in a recreational facility of the Ministry of the Interior where she served the top Communist functionnaires, including the Prime Minister of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Lubomír Štrougal. She never married, in 1989, her only son Josef wasa born. After 2000, she taught practical subjects at a hospitality school in Frenštát pod Radhoštěm. For 23 years, she served in the town council of Prostřední Bečva, where she also lived at the time of recording the interview in 2021.