Pavla Mikešová

* 1956

  • "When they came to my parents' house and searched it, I lived about five kilometres away from them in a JZD apartment building, where I was given an apartment. I had three small children. The youngest was two years old. I know that in the evening, my brother came to our house on his motorbike and told us what had happened, that the police had come, searched the place, taken away the books, and that they had found the transcribed literature. And he told me, 'If you have anything else at home, destroy it immediately.' I had this folder in which I kept various texts. My husband picked it up and threw it all in the kettle to burn."

  • "The truth is that I brought the poorly legible copy home, and the first person to read it was my old man (grandfather). It was clear that it was a fine message for him. I said to him, 'Old man, I need to rewrite it now,' and he said, 'I'll dictate it to you, okay?' So we created it with my old man. He was very good at dictating, and he learned very quickly that he always had to wait a little while because I couldn't type that fast. He'd read a certain section, then wait until I said 'hm', and we'd move on. We were good together. I'd come home from work, and when I had time, we'd go copy. It's hard to say how much we copied."

  • "I wanted to go to high school. I always gravitated towards the humanities. And I knew I wouldn't stay home because I had a brother, and it was automatically assumed that he would inherit the farm and stay home. I knew I should move on. So I was looking at grammar schools or some high schools. And suddenly, I found out that I couldn't, that the door was closed to me because I was from a religious family, plus they were private farmers who refused to join the JZD. So I had the wrong cadre, the wrong background. That was very bad."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, 07.04.2016

    (audio)
    duration: 01:40:28
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
  • 2

    Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, 08.04.2016

    (audio)
    duration: 42:38
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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Forced to join the cooperative, our family was uprooted

Pavla Mikešová / 1978
Pavla Mikešová / 1978
photo: archive of Pavla Mikešová

Pavla Mikešová, née Sedláčková, was born on 3 December 1956 in an evangelical family in Růžďka in the Vsetín region. Her father, Jan Sedláček, was a farmer on the family farm. Since the 1950s, the family faced pressure from the communists to join a unified agricultural cooperative. It was not until 1976 that the father signed the application form for the cooperative. As the daughter of a so-called kulak, she was not allowed to study at grammar school. Thanks to the help of her class teacher, she got into an agricultural high school. With her father and grandfather, she copied and distributed Charter 77 and various samizdat publications. She helped distribute religious literature published in Western Europe. The Sedláček family hid hundreds of books from abroad in their granary. Upon discovering the Christian literature translation site, her father was arrested and held in detention for six months. Eventually, he was sentenced to probation for economic crimes. Her grandfather was also prosecuted. Pavla Mikešová worked in the JZD in Bystřička. After the cooperative was dissolved, she worked at the Czech Insurance Company until her retirement. She is a mother of four children and lives in Bystřička.