“What was the atmosphere like? Nowadays people talk about everything in front of the children, back then they wouldn’t say anything, it was sort of mysterious… But I know that when I got here my husband’s father was Mayor during the occupation and several people who weren’t delivering enough, the Germans checked up on them and did inspections and if they found an illegal hen or a sheep it was big trouble, and when the inspection came they asked the Mayor how many communists there were and he told them that there weren’t any and they asked if he swore on his head and he said yes… And there were a lot of communists but they were good people.”
“Well our Dad hid everything he could but then we would be in the basement where we had potatoes and radish but once, on the 14th of March, the basement was open and there was a Russian with a machine gun asking whether there was a German and we said no but he went through the house with his gun and searched everything but it was already ten o’clock when another Russian soldier came with a German soldier and a rifle into the kitchen, he was about eighteen years old with large blue eyes, he was crying and the Russian was putting the rifle into his mouth with a piece of black lard on it and the boy couldn’t and he thought he was hungry but the poor boy didn’t do anything and so I was talking to him and he said: “I’m the only son, my Dad died in the war and my Mum lives alone” and he gave me an address to write to her that he was captured, so I wrote a letter but I don’t know if it was bombed over there or not so I have no idea if the Mum received it or not.”
“At that time I was fifteen and I remember that a bomb fell in front of the parish and it killed the priest and Romanians and we used to spend time down there so my sister and I thought we would go have a look but Dad forbade us to but we went anyway and we saw a large hole in the ground and the priest had paper where his head used to be because the shrapnel, the fragments completely smashed his head, such was the aftermath of war.”
Milada Filipovičová, née Helešicová, was born on October 13th, 1929 in Moravská Nová Ves. She had three siblings. When she was seven years old their mother died and their father soon found a new wife who was very hard working, but very strict with her stepchildren. Milada had excellent grades in school but her stepmother didn’t let her enroll in a high school - all of the siblings had to work at the family farm. After World War II she married and had five children. In the 1950s the family was forced to hand over their property to the agricultural cooperative (JZD) and to work there themselves. They refused to enter the Communist Party and kept on going to the church, even though their children got bad references in school as a result. Their sons Jiří and Mirek emigrated to Canada in the 1980s. The parents didn’t know about their children’s intentions and only learned about their departure from State Security officers. The other siblings weren’t allowed to study at university and had to enroll in vocational schools. After the revolution their son Mirek came back from Canada and lives with his mother. Her husband died a couple of years after the revolution.
