The hard life of a resistance fighter’s daughter. Communist power broke what the Gestapo could not
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Milena (Růžena Vladimíra) Dolanská was born on 11 August 1927 in Prague. Her father, Franjo Aubrecht, served as a cavalry officer in Košice at the time, but her maternal grandmother, Marie Ryšánková from Bohdaneč, insisted on giving birth in Prague. Before the war, the family lived in Košice, then Brandýs nad Labem and Bohdaneč near Pardubice. The father had fought in the First World War, first on the Russian front, then as a legionnaire in Italy, where he received four war medals. He was also a successful horse racing competitor, who ranked three times in the top places of Velká Pardubická. During the war, the father joined the resistance. He was active in the National Defense and ÚVOD. At the end of the war, he founded his own resistance group. He was involved, for example, in harboring paratroopers from the Silver A group or in espionage in Synthesia Semtín. Milena Dolanská completed four grades of grammar school. And after a series of arrests, she transferred to a family school. In 1945, her father got into disputes with the communist wing of the army led by Bedřich Reicin. He was imprisoned just after the war. And he got arrested again on Christmas Day 1948 and given twenty-five years in a trumped-up trial. After the war, Milena Dolanská married her father’s colleague Rudolf Vařečka, who was also arrested and sentenced to twelve years in 1949 after mediating his wife’s meeting with the imprisoned Franjo Aubrecht. In 1948, her daughter Milena was born, but the family was left with no means. So she had to go to work, which she found very difficult to get. She first worked in a dairy, then in Synthesia, and finally in Hradec Králové. She divorced her husband during his stay in prison, remarried in 1954 to Vítězslav Dolanský, and moved with him to Cheb for several years. Her younger brother Vladimír was also persecuted and wrongly accused of murder. He later tried unsuccessfully to escape across the border and eventually moved to Austria to join his wife. Franjo Aubrecht left prison in 1960 after the amnesty of President Antonín Novotný and went to Dvor Králové, to Kladno, and then to Prague. He died on 23 January 1985 at the age of 88. Daughter Milena Dolanská lived in Lázně Bohdaneč in 2022.
