“In each preparation, when we worked with the children, we had to write an ideological plan, which we had to follow throughout the lessons, and then draw a conclusion from it and write an evaluation. For example, love for the Soviet Union, a poem about Lenin… We had to write what it gave to the children and so on. And there were constant checks and they were bossing us around, because it was no longer normal. I have to say it was a terrible time."
"As you asked about a street child, you wouldn't believe it. I was fourteen and I was really looking forward to Christmas. It's very difficult to talk about it. You know how a child saves money so that he/she can give his parents something under the tree. I really wanted a watch then, and when I asked my father, he told me to ask my mother. She told me not to bother her. It was Christmas Eve, and there was no tree, no food. I told them it would be Christmas Day today, and they said, "So what?" At the end, I ran away from home. Only in my blouse, I got on a train and went to Odry to my sister. And no one was looking for me all holiday! At all. Along the way, I caught purulent tonsillitis and they had to call a doctor. It's my fifth birthday on January 5th, and when I came back at the end of the Christmas holidays because of school, I thought they would yell at me or beat me for it. Nobody asked anything at all. How many times I have wished if I had at least been beaten..."
"It was allegedly said at a meeting of the Communist Party that my father publicly spoke out against the Communist Party and accused Grebeníček of some inhumane pressure on prisoners and put a party ID card there and left. If he was eventually fired or left alone...? I just know that he had written in his workbook or whatever it was that he was politically undesirable. And with that, he found it very difficult to apply for a job in the 1950s.
"The year 1948 brought changes into the society. Ordinary people, especially in the village, had to enter the collective farm and they found it difficult to say goodbye to their property. At that time, there were many people who asked for advice. My mother was called Mrs. Radová (Mrs Advice) and my father was Mr. Rado (Mr Advice). Such a funny thing. For example, some grandma came and had a goose in her armpit because they didn't have the money to pay for the advice. Or they brought something else, like eggs. I didn't quite understand it then."
"People from his industry came to us, that is, judges and such a portentous elite of big nabobs from Uherské Hradiště. All children had to play tennis, go to the piano, to ballet. My sister too, my brother not, he was a normal boy, a scamp. At that time, that people occurred to me terribly fake. They were meeting at our place, for example, once a week. They sat under a crystal chandelier at a large oval table, plush carpet, parquet floor. Poor mom wasn't into it at all. She always wore a dark blue polka dot dress with a white collar and served this posh company. Under the table, I listened to the words and gossip about what was going on, and I began to learn about the society of that time. If you weren't either a law doctor or a doctor, you were not good enough for them. That's when I decided that those people weren't worth it and they wouldn't play any important role in my life. It was, for example: 'Look at that Běťačka,' meaning my mother, 'she has the same clothes again, there is no ham on those sandwiches, who knows what it is, and look at how dirty the parquet floor is...' It was repeated in different versions. I didn't trust those people at all. They didn't even notice that I was listening to them. But my father, because he came from a very poor family, was glad that he had risen to this level, so he tried to fulfil all their wishes, which I didn't like much."
"After a few years, probably in 1952, my father who disagreed with the regime hung up his robe, put on his working trousers, and to prove that he could make a living by hand, he went to the workshops of Mr. Prášil. They welded and worked with iron there. My father raised a heavy traverse there and suffered a bilateral hernia injury. He ended up in a hospital banned from physical labor. What now? He got politically undesirable from the court and he was unable to work physically."
Zdenka Burešová was born on January 5, 1946 in Uherské Hradiště. From 1948 to 1950 her father JUDr. Alois Běťák worked as a district and a regional judge in this town. In August 1950 he was transferred to Třebíč. According to the witness, the father voluntarily resigned as a judge in 1952 because he did not want to send people to prison for political reasons. Work trousers became his work clothes instead of the judge’s robe. Later, after a work accident he found employment as a corporate lawyer. Humiliation and the loss of social status led him to deep depression and resignation to life. Zdenka Burešová recalls that neither of her parents showed the slightest interest in her at that time. As she says, she became a street child. She had to take care of herself, and no one cared how she dressed, what she ate, with whom she associated, or what she studied. In 1963, her father died of a heart attack at the age of 55. Zdenka graduated from a pedagogical school and then worked as an educator in kindergartens. In 1997 she successfully completed distance learning of special pedagogy at the University of Ostrava. She then worked as a teacher at a special primary school in Orlová, where she taught children with various dysfunctional disorders. She has a son Mark from her first marriage. She lived in Jeseník in 2020
