"We were actually really trying to kind of ... from the real unionists because we were doing the farming, the races ... it wasn't that we were taking it in any political way. Well, but we just worked there. And then we had to sign that we agreed to the troops coming in."
"How did that go?"
"'I'm just never going to sign,' that's what I said. 'I'm just not going to sign it no matter what.' This supervisor of mine, I can't remember her name, but she was a straight, fine woman, she was in the party, but she wanted to help us. She said, 'Please, what are you going to help yourself with? You say you're not going to sign, you're going to be thrown out of your job, you're going to be thrown out of the hostel. What are you going to do?' And I said, 'But I'm not...' She says, 'It's just a piece of paper, so sign it and that's it.' So I signed it, like everybody signed it."
"We had friends from Slovakia come to stay with us, I don't know why on this date, but they were sleeping at my hostel and we invited them to go to the Fleks in the evening. We didn't realise anything was going to happen. We took the tram from Jindřišská Street through Wenceslas Square to Vodičkova Street. Yeah, but there was a huge demonstration on Wenceslas Square. They started throwing tear gas into the tram and that was ours, that was our SS. And the militiamen were standing there, well, just terrible. We crossed Wenceslas Square. I remember like today: there was a mother with a child in a pram, the child was crying, madly, because a tear gas... an adult, let alone a child... Well, it was terrible. Well, we went, but we were not in the mood for any more sessions, but since we hadn't seen those guys for a long time, they were from Hlohovec, Slovakia, so we sat with them. Then we went back to the hostel, but by then the shooting was already going on. There on the Republic Square. We had to cross Republic Square, because everywhere was closed, nowhere would let us go back to Jindřišká, so we walked all the way around Republic Square to the Central Station. We went that way. And on that Square of the Republic there was, I don't know if one or two, dead."
"So we went to live in Jevany, but in the other part, the villa part of Jevany. There is a kind of villa part in Jevany and we moved there too, back to the owners. But imagine that again it was a villa where there were two apartments and the national committee took both of those apartments from them: the tenants lived upstairs and we lived downstairs as tenants too. And the Hladiks, who owned the house, lived in Prague. The Hladik family had an outhouse, which was probably previously for a gardener or a servant. So they were using this annex from their house. There was also a huge garden with a volleyball court, with woods, it was a villa in the woods. I mean, beautiful trees. Pine trees all over the garden. Beautiful woods, basically, they used to pick mushrooms there because it was really in the woods. And the people, the owners, used the outhouse. And that didn't occur to me at all at the time. It was just the way it was. We just moved in and that was it. And it was only... because we didn't have access to that information, it was only when you grew up and when the regime changed that I realised all that. And how awful it was. It's like somebody put tenants in our house now."
Miloslava Krumlová, née Pačesová, was born on 15 November 1949 in Český Brod. Her young parents’ families came from Central Bohemia, both belonging to the poorer strata of society. The witness graduated from the three-year Secondary School of Economics in Prague, majoring in foreign language correspondence, and completed her high school diploma by distance learning twenty years later. She has vivid memories of 21 August 1968 in the centre of Prague and of the same period a year later. She worked mostly in administration in the editorial offices of magazines and SODM (Association of Organizations of Children and Youth, later SSM). In Prague, she lived with her husband and two small children in unsatisfactory conditions, so they decided to leave and take a job anywhere that offered them a job and an apartment. So in 1976 they found themselves in Vrchlabí, where they still live today and where together they have built a thriving and quality bookstore. This was preceded by a period when she worked in administration and also guided for CEDOK, and later she worked briefly in Vápenka in Kunčice. Miloslava Krumlová had always loved to read, but that was not nearly enough in the early days of the business boom in the early 1990s: there was no experience in business in general after a long period when everything was run by the state. Her story outlines the pitfalls and successes experienced by those who started private business after the Velvet Revolution.
Opening of the woodcarving by Jaroslav Kundrát in the bookstore in Vrchlabí. Opening speech by the writer Marie Kubátová, the witness is standing on the right, 1990s
Opening of the woodcarving by Jaroslav Kundrát in the bookstore in Vrchlabí. Opening speech by the writer Marie Kubátová, the witness is standing on the right, 1990s
