Emílie Milerová

“He has a pure open heart, is at the kids’ level and is friendly and optimistic. That’s what children need. And he’s funny too. That’s how my husband was. He was like the Mole. Completely ingenuous. He looked at everything with the eyes of a three-year-old kid. I took this over from him. We were together for 54 years. Well and now I’ve paid for it.”

“What were your hobbies, what did you want to become?” – “I wanted to be an artist but 1951 was the worst year for decision-making. Pionýr (Pioneer) had been founded but I didn’t join – I had already been a member of Junák and Sokol. That was enough for me not to get accepted into school. I thought the inspector was going to kill me when I told him I wanted to be a costume designer. He said that no one needed costume designers, that there was class struggle and people had to work. So I got into a school of chemistry.”

“My father had a hernia and had have an operation in the General Hospital in Prague. My mother and I were terrified. I had a sister who was ten years older than me. We were frightened and were waiting for something terrible to happen. One day dad was dismissed from the hospital and his stomach was all infected. He took a tram but then had to walk about five kilometers home. After the operation. He came home, lay down and then we saw an aircraft squadron. The hospital was completely bombed-out. My dad missed it by half a day. I remember clearly how my mum wanted to look at his wound to treat it. She was a herbalist. My father took off his trousers and he had about twelve stitches there, six on each side. As he straightened up, pus gushed out from the stitches. He went weak in the knees and had to lie down. My mum treated him and got him out of it.”

“Every time when we killed a pig and finished eating it, I would always get hungry at four p.m. and my mother would cut me a piece of this disgusting bread and spread some jam on it. I thought I’d go mad, I couldn’t eat it. And everything was rationed. Our mum was so amazing that she walked fifteen kilometers to the baker, all the way to Jesenice. It’s called Na Kocandě, there used to be a miller there and he sold rationed loaves of bread. My mum used to walk there and back, carrying those two loaves of bread. Fifteen kilometers. Once, when she had almost made it home, she fell down. She had been so exhausted that she fell. On her forehead. So we both cried over it. We had a tweezer at home and I had to pick out the little stones out of her forehead and she had a really low pain threshold so she cried a lot. And she was left with this fine grain there forever.”

“We had two neighbors here, they were State Security agents and when a dissident came to our garden on a Sunday, my husband would be hauled over the coals on Monday already. The general manager would dress him down and we had to pay up because we had had a million debts on the house…” – “Were you in touch with dissidents?” – “Yes, a lot. Ivan and Helena Klímovi lived right next to us, Vaculík used to come here, Kohout, Ivan Klíma’s brother and this whole crew. But then, when Ivan was persecuted, he closed up and didn’t want to see us anymore because he was afraid it would do us harm.” – “Did you attend home lectures?” – “I used to go to the readings at Klímovi. What went on there? People met and read what they had written. But later we got too afraid to go. The pressure was so big… Of course I had been invited to a house theatre play for example but I didn’t dare go. The times were so terrible, it really wasn’t worth it. We had small children, I was at home, no money. My husband was with the Animated movies and it was really tough then.”