“...someone rang at the gate, I went to open it, there was crowd of men there, and I immediately realised: They’re coming for us. So I banged the gate shut and rushed downstairs and said: ‘Hide quickly, they’re coming for us.’ So we locked ourselves in, but they even broke through the bars to get inside. In the end we were still obliged to come out in the name of the law. We didn’t even know where they were taking us. And they took us to Modrá near Bratislava. From Batizovce to Modrá. We were there a year. Then they took us from place to place... Hanušovice, Hejnice, Broumov, Vratislavice, Poustevna, they’d keep us there for two years, three years, constantly moving us around.”
“Oh, we didn’t vote in their elections. It was poll time, an army lorry drove up, we wondered what was going on. Well, if you don’t go vote, the soldiers will shoot you all dead. We said, so shoot us, but we’re not going to vote. And we were completely unperturbed... Then their chief said: ‘You know what, if it’s okay, we’ll vote instead of you and we’ll let you live.’ We said: ‘Do what you want, but we won’t go vote.’ So they voted instead of us, and the soldiers even played us a tune afterwards, then they piled back into the lorry and drove off.”
“I was a candidate, and now they asked me: ‘Do you want to come with us?’ I said: ‘Well of course.’ So one of the nuns lent me her clothes, so I could go with them. But then one of the men said: ‘I saw one of you dressed differently, where is she?’ When I’d banged the gate shut in their faces, he’d noticed I was different than the others. So we quickly got changed, there were four of us, and it didn’t even occur to me that we would be taken away, I had no idea...”
Full recordings
1
Klášter sester Voršilek Jiřetín pod Jedlovou, 18.03.2015
Viktorie Mikulčíková was born on 2 December 1930 in the village of Pozlovice near Luhačovice. She comes from a family of farmers, she had four siblings and attended school during World War 2. After completing primary school she held her ill mother with the household. In 1950 at twenty years of age, the witness received a sign that she should enter the Order of St Ursula. She travelled to the convent in Batizovce, Slovakia, where she was to undertake her novitiate. On 29 August 1950 she was forcibly deported together with the other nuns to the “collection monastery” in Modrá near Pezinka. From that time until 1989 she was forced to work in various jobs, just like the other members of the order. For sixteen years the nuns were barred from doing any work which would be in connection with tending to the needy. In 1966 they were finally allowed to do something - they worked with mentally retarded children in Poustevna (The Hermitage). From 1990 to 1995 she stayed in the Ursulines’ head convent in Rome. She then moved to Jiřetín pod Jedlovou, into a house belonging to the Order of St Ursula.
