Vlasta Havlenová

* 1932

  • “It was about the Cowards. My husband spoke about it, and somehow it happened that soon afterwards - I guess it was a senior student, who heard this assessment of Škvorecký, and he came somewhere to the university of education in Liberec and spoke of Škvorecký in the way my husband had. He was informed that this was wrong. Then it happened that an inspection visited the school and sat in on our classes. They chose the lessons of my husband and me. They didn’t go anywhere else. It seemed strange to us, but we didn’t think about it at the time. A number of years passed by, there was a class reunion, and one of my husband’s students started saying: ‘Professor, I assessed Škvorecký according to the way you told us, and I was given a right dressing down, and when I had to switch to the university in Ústí nad Labem for family reasons, I spoke of Škvorecký again, this time in the way the inspection said I should have, and I was given another dressing down, so now I don’t know what to think about it.’ This minor episode showed us the probable cause of that surprise inspection, when both my husband and I were called in for a talk, even though I taught at the second level of the eleven-year school and he taught at the third level - it was this.”

  • “They applied pressure in other ways. They set how much grain, potatoes, milk you should deliver according to the number of hectares you had. You also had to hand in cattle, pigs, and eggs. There were quotas for how much you were to deliver based on the size of your farm. What that meant for my dad was that when he handed in the grain, potatoes, milk, they calculated that he hadn’t fulfilled one hundred per cent of his quota, only eighty per cent of it, and so he had to pay a fine. So the money he was to receive for the grain wasn’t paid out to him because they were blocked and were used to pay the fine. The situation was the the only income of my dad, aunt, brother, and sister, who still lived at home back then, was that aunt’s pension, because Dad didn’t receive any of the money at all. That was a bad state of affairs.”

  • “It was horrible for the children to have to sit on a stool by the hop plants from dawn till dusk. That would have been okay, we would have even kept them entertained, we even let them run around for a bit, but the accommodation was the worst. They stuck us up over a stable - the loft was clean, there were straw mattresses there, freshly made, some crates where the children could put their things on, the occasional hook in the beams to hang things from, but the entrance was the worst. You had to go up stairs with no railings. When a child needed the toilet in the night, it came to the open space of the stables. My husband and I didn’t sleep at all, and we took turns with our third colleague. The boys and girls were all in one room, of course, and there was always someone sitting by the entrance to make sure the children wouldn’t fall down.”

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    Rumburk, 17.10.2017

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    duration: 02:52:37
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You should live so as not to hurt anyone but rather to help people instead

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photo: Archiv Vlasty Havlenové

Vlasta Havlenová was born on 5 March 1932 into a farmers’ family in Bitětice (now a part of Pelhřimov). Her parents owned a sizeable estate.The whole family was significantly affected by the Nazi occupation. Vlasta’s cousin Jaroslav Dvořák was arrested by the Gestapo in 1945 and executed in Terezín in early May of the same year. Vlasta attended grammar school in Čáslav, but when the Communist Party came to power, she and her closest relatives suffered from various forms of political persecution. The uncle whom she stayed with in Čáslav was an important local functionary of the National Socialist Party, and as such he was fired from his job as school inspector; Vlasta’s father struggled with the consequences of forced collectivisation in the early 1950s. The witness graduated from grammar school in 1951, but her political profile meant that any further studies were out of the question. She could only fulfil her dream of a teaching career thanks to the lack of educators in the border regions at the time. She completed a preparation course for teachers and launched her career in the Šluknov Spur. She stayed loyal to the region her whole life. While employed in Velký Šenov near Šluknov, she met her future husband Jaroslav Havlena, who spent three months in custody in 1949 for political reasons. Later, the couple moved to Rumburk, where Vlasta Havlenová gave birth to their two sons Vladimír and Jiří. The Havlenas took an active part in social life in the Šluknov Spur and taught several generations of pupils. Although a widow since 2015, the witness still lives in Rumburk.