“My daddy used to grow grass seeds. In June one would need to cut it, by the end of the month it would ripe – various types of oatgrass and other similar things. One would need to cut it all by morning dew. We would go to the fields as early as at 3 a.m. We had to cut it before the dew evaporated and to put it into sheaves with the ears hidden inside so that when the seed which was the most valuable wouldn’t fall out in sunlight. It had to be protected. When it dried out, we would take it home and then my dad had some machines to put it into. It would get threshed, and then cleaned up. He used to take the grains into a cultivation station in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm.”
“They came to our place to arrest daddy and he had to walk them to the cottage. I remember that it was winter, snow, and we were all kneeling down back home and prayed with the rosary because it was clear that if there were somebody at the cottage, they would defend themselves. And my dad had to walk in as the first one. Luckily, there was nobody there so they released him. He came home.”
“It was a full court room. I have a document stating how many of them were tried there, how many years in aggregate did they receive and how much in fines. This was announced by the local radio to the whole city of Uherské Hradiště. We were standing there… My mum was hospitalized with pneumonia while me and my sisters were present in the courtroom. For what I know they only gave tickets to family members. We were standing as children in some corner with František Mana, son of a resistance member, while his father was sentenced to death. That was horrible. Then we went to see mum in the hospital and her first question was: ‘Where’s daddy??’ She believed that since he did nothing wrong, they would release him. But he got sixteen years of prison time. It was crazy.”
Ladislava Guričová was born on the 26th of December, 1938 into the family of a farmer and mayor of Střelná Josef Ptáček. After the war, the family lost part of their estate to Vsetín’s arms factory. Further property was confiscated from them by the Communists following the events of February 1948. The Ptáček family lost the rest of their property in 1950 when Ladislava’s father was sentenced time in prison for his support of an anti-communist group, Světlana. Since 1953, Ladislava worked in a menial job because she was not allowed to study any further. Her father returned from prison in 1958 and died of the consequences a year later. In 1960, Ladislava got married and soon after gave birth to a child. She applied for a night high-school but was prevented from studying. After the fall of communism, she served as a member of the local assembly in Valašské Klobouky. Now, she occasionally attends schools and discusses life in totalitarian Czechoslovakia with students. Ladislava Guričová died in January 2022.
