"Dad joined the party right after the war and was there for four months. Four months later he threw it on their table. Because he imagined, he always said to us: 'Kids, I imagined it would be a party that would help people and just run things the way people run their lives, and the opposite is true.' So, three months or four months later he got out."
"...my uncle was a lawyer in Prague, he worked at the Ministry and he always came to my mother and told her. And my mother was obviously shaken by it and she defended her a lot. And it was actually afterwards, when it all came to me that the people didn't even know, I remember when there was an event in Bánov, a small one, and there were these well versed ones, when Milada Horáková, I remember that, when she was sentenced to death, and the people there, there were a few of them, and they were clapping."
"I remember - there were these activists who came and exhorted, gave lectures, and they always did that somewhere in the hall and called the farmers there. They didn't go there, of course, and it was just, it was so cruel because those people were dependent on that land or just – they then saw themselves just like when everything will stop and they won’t have anything to plant on, it's all will go south. But to teach the today's generation to farm again the way it used to be. They used to be big farmers, they had horses, and then they would lend those horses to these young, these poor people who had small fields to plough, so they would lend them those horses to plough, to harrow and everything else."
Father was forced to labour, and mother was arrested by Gestapo
Vojtěška Gazdíková in 2022
photo: fotografie byla pořízena při natáčení v roce 2022
photo: fotografie byla pořízena při natáčení v roce 2022
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Vojtěška Gazdíková, née Hauerlandová, was born on 22 July 1943 in Bánov, southeast Moravia. Her father, Jan Hauerland, was called up for forced labour in Austria in 1943. Soon after, his wife Božena gave birth to twins - Božena and Vojtěška. Jan decided to flee Austria. He had been hiding for some time in and around Bánov when the Gestapo came for his wife, who was then imprisoned and abused for three quarters of a year in the detention centre in Uherské Hradiště. Božena Hauerlandová then suffered health consequences and died of cancer in 1953. Jan decided to turn himself in and return to the forced labour after Božena was imprisoned. Yet he refused to accept the situation - he cut off his index finger. He was investigated for sabotage and even without a finger was not allowed to go home. He did not return until after the end of World War II in 1945. Vojtěška grew up in the backdrop of a small village where collectivisation of agriculture was also taking place. The family lost a cow and two small fields, which they still farmed privately. In 1960, she trained as a textile saleswoman and eight years later, during the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, from a professional point of view she experienced a shortage of the goods she sold - mainly baby diapers. In 1972 she married Břetislav Gazdík, with whom she had two children, Jan and Kateřina. At the time of recording, she was living in a home for the elderly in Uherský Brod.
