Jiřina Císařová

* 1923

  • “The Unified Agricultural cooperative confiscated the land in 1951, but later they were buying out the land, because of silos, for instance. At that time, they simply threatened that you had to sell your land. You have to sign it, and if you don’t sign, we will then expropriate the land from you. In this way, you will at least get sixty Hallers, or how much it was, I don’t know, or forty Hallers, and if you don’t sign it, you will not receive anything at all.”

  • “The Vlasov soldiers were here. Two of them spent the night in our house. The general, Vlasov, he slept in the house of Mika and in doctor Ježek’s place, they were in touch with him. The two who slept in our house were very nice boys. The Vlasov soldiers liberated the main post office in Prague. Were it not for them, all people inside would have died there, including my sister-in-law. They were starving there and people were sending them biscuits through the tube post system.”

  • “One day they came and as soon as my husband finished his lunch, they summoned him to a police station. He has not come back. He stayed there for 130 days. They took him to the police station in Bartolomějská. I only saw him before the court trial. I was allowed to visit him only once, but I was not allowed to give him anything. They accused him of sabotage and of disrupting the five-year plan, but these were all made-up accusations. He used the common practice of sprinkling saltpeter on grass, but they did not understand it and they accused him. They swore at him, calling him a kulak and they were beating him on his face. They were giving them unpeeled potatoes to eat, or a cucumber and tea for supper. He suffered from hunger there and when he returned, he was emaciated. He was held in a basement in a kind of dungeon. There were five of them and they had a toilet in one of the corners of the cell. It was dark there and he could not see anything when he came out. He suffered from eye problems as a result of it. Eventually they released him, but they even said that people like him should not get imprisoned but that they should form the core of Unified Agricultural Cooperatives.”

  • “He came back and he later worked as a horse driver here. After they had not been able to send him to prison in February, he received a draft order for the army service. It was supposed to be an extraordinary military exercise. It was on February 2, 1952. They worked in a quarry in Zbiroh. They did not even have gloves, but just leather finger protectors. His son was five and his daughter was one year old when he had to go to the army service. Eventually he spent whole two years there, until January 15, 1954. He was in the Auxiliary Technical Battalions, it was called PTP.”

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    Praha - Řeporyje, 23.03.2006

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They did not evict us. We had to put up with strangers who were coming to work on our farm

Jiřina Císařová 1940
Jiřina Císařová 1940
photo: archiv pamětnice

Jiřina Císařová, née Martínková, was born June 8, 1923 in Mečeříž in the Mladá Boleslav district into the family of farmer Josef Martínek. After her mother’s death in 1929 she and her brother Josef were being raised by their father. One more sibling came into the family later after her father had remarried. In 1944 Jiřina married Václav Císař and followed him to his farm in Řeporyje. Vlasov soldiers were entering Prague through this village. During the Prague Uprising, her sister-in-law was forced to stay in the occupied main post office building in Prague for five days before she was able to return home. When the Communist Party assumed power in 1948, the newly established agricultural cooperative confiscated the Císař family’s land as well as their farm and in 1951 Václav Císař was accused of alleged sabotage. He was persecuted in detention for several months before the court eventually acquitted him. In spite of this, further persecution followed and in 1952 he had to go to a special military exercise, which was originally supposed to last several months but which eventually extended into two years of service in the Auxiliary Technical Battalions. Jiřina Císařová had to stay alone with their two young children. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989 the family managed to get part of their property back, but during the communist era they had inevitably lost one third of their land which they forcibly had to sell.