Father died in a communist prison, mother from stress and exhaustion
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Růžena Valčíková, née Skřipková, was born on the 9th of August 1933 in Horní Lideč. Her family owned an extensive estate, on which all of its members helped work. Růžena had three siblings: Jaroslav, František, and Ladislav. Ladislav joined the anti-Nazi resistance during the Second World War, was arrested, and only managed to be saved from execution by a bribe to the Gestapo. Ladislav also did not come to love the coming of communism. Already in June 1948 he emigrated to Germany. Due to this the family faced interrogations and was watched by State Security (StB). A year later Růžena’s father Jan Skřipka allowed the walking-agent Antonín Janošík, who was a member of the resistance organization Světlana. In the spring of the year 1950 the group was destroyed. Jan Skřipka belonged among the three hundred who were arrested and at the court proceddings, where capital and life sentences were doled out, he walked away with fifteen years in prison. After three years her mother Anna died. The burden of high quotas and being separated from her husband abused her to death. The children stayed for a while alone on the estate, before they were taken in by family from the Šumperk border region. Jan Skřipka died in Mírov in the year 1957. The regime refused to give his body for a funeral and also refused to give out the cremated remains. The Skřipek family only managed to get their hands on the urn during the political loosening at the end of the sixties. Růžena married Jan Valčík, with whom she had two sons, Jan and Vlastimil. Due to still working at the nationalized estate she never attended a vocational school and spent her whole life working in the lowest manual professions. After the Velvet Revolution in the year 1989 the family achieved the rehabilitation of Jan Skřipka and later also the return of the property that had been stolen by the regime. Růžena Valčíková lived in Horní Lideč in the year 2020.
