Věra Mlčochová

* 1934

  • "He only had five general classes, but he was in the party and it was hard enough just to sign the papers my father wrote, because he typed, because as chief constable before he was always doing things, so he knew how to do everything, even on the phone. And he [the chairman] didn't even know how to use the telephone and he always had a hard time signing what my father produced. And then he could only sign. He was illegitimate and they said he grew up on dung. So he was kind of a sort of a maverick, but the first thing he did was join the party as they were doing the recruiting. And he didn't know what it really entailed, so he joined the party and that was that."

  • "My father's brother lived in Brno-Slatina, married, and they had a daughter who was two years older than me. He [the uncle] remarried later and they had even younger children, so the mother doted on them, and the cousin was terribly hungry, so she once bragged to us about how well she ate. I asked her: 'What did you have?' She said: 'They killed the dog and we had it with cream.' Well there was no cream, so it was with milk. So they ate the dog's meat, and how well she ate, poor thing. And she was hungry, and then she died of tuberculosis and malnutrition. Then they took her to Šaratice, and they got her some babysitting at the farmers there, so she could eat, but it didn't help."

  • "It came out that he had escaped from Germany, where the young people had been taken to work. Here and there someone managed to escape. And some boy escaped from a village under the forest, near those Šaratice, and came home. An order came that his father should go and find him and report that the Gestapo was looking for him. And he sent a message to a friend who lived somewhere there that he would go there to check, to hide. So he hid in the woods. He [the father] still went with a German to check on them, they searched the apartment, threw everything around, and then they left and he [the boy] was able to go back, to his parents, he had family there."

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    Troubky, 10.03.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 01:52:44
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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“It would be a pity to die now,” my mother said at the time of the Velvet Revolution.

Věra Mlčochová (period photo)
Věra Mlčochová (period photo)
photo: archive of a witness

Věra Mlčochová, née Kheilová, was born on 5 February 1934 in Blažovice near Brno. Her father, Bohuslav Kheil, who came from a mixed Czech-German family, was at that time a gendarme constable in Subcarpathian Rus, where he was transferred. The whole family lived there until 1939, when the Czechs had to leave Subcarpathian Rus after the Hungarian invasion. After more than a week’s anabasis, they anchored in Šaratnice near Brno. The witness remembers the events connected with the Second World War, especially the bombing of Brno and the liberation. Because her dad refused to join the Communist Party after February 1948, he was dismissed from the gendarmerie (later the SNB) and found a job as a secretary at the MNV (Local National Committee) in Troubky, where the family moved. The witness graduated from the secondary school of social law in Brno, then worked as a social worker at the court in Přerov and Olomouc, lived briefly with her husband in Sokolov and after moving back to Moravia worked until her retirement at Přerov Engineering Works. She and her husband raised one daughter. In 2024 Věra Mlčochová lived in Troubky.