Miroslava Molíková

* 1928

  • "That's when we were travelling on a bus with both girls and my mum from Bulgaria from our vacation. And all the way across Slovakia to Brno we never met a single Soviet soldier. So we came home and slept in our apartment. At that time we lived on Zemědělská Street. And my husband left for work in the morning and was back in a minute. And he said, 'You're snoring here, and there's a crowd of people in front of the shop, hurrying to buy supplies because the Russians are here and we don't know what we're going to do. And you're snoring and we've got nothing at home!' So I jumped up, I went to see. There really was an endless queue outside the shop, I think everything in the shop was cleared out at the moment what could be taken. That was the end of it."

  • "When the front was coming and the shooting was coming, we went to that shelter. And we were hidden there. I remember my dad came out of the shelter and in front of the door that we had to the street, to the fields, he observed through binoculars what the place looked like. And apparently the Russians saw him, so they fired. And it was Sunday at quarter to eight in the evening when Dad quickly went into the shelter and said, 'We've got to get out of here.' We're going to rush to the common shelter, which was under the malt house, where all the citizens of Mořice were, because it was a huge space and some of them had clothes and blankets and I don't know what all with them. But we didn't have anything with us, only my mother had a milk jug, in which, before we went into our little garden shelter, she put our personal documents and what she thought was necessary, and we took it with us to the shelter. Well, we were in that shelter that was under the malt house for about two and a half days. And we didn't see the first Russian soldiers going through Mořice in that shelter until Tuesday at nine thirty in the evening. And because the Germans had made a machine-gun nest out of our house, and Haná, that's an area that's flat, that you can see very far, so when they were approaching, the Germans drove them back by shooting, so that the Russians had no choice but to set fire to the three places from which the Germans were defending themselves. Our house, the roof of the church and the roof of the malt house. So when we came out of that common shelter and approached our house and saw the pile of rubble, we all cried. That was the first time I'd ever seen my dad cry. So as we were approaching the ruin, there were some Soviet soldiers coming towards us. And when he saw that we were crying, he asked my mother, but he must have been a citizen who understood the Czech language. So my mother pointed: 'That was our house, we don't have it anymore. Where are we going to go?' And the Soviet soldier said: 'You have a husband. You have...,' -that's what he did- 'You have children, and I have nothing. I'm alone. My wife and children killed.'"

  • "My mum was a very talkative person and liked to be around people. So if, for example, six people came over at once, they would all sit around the radio and listen. My dad had on a front gate, and we didn't have a little door, but we had a gate that you drove through with the cattle and the seed drill and everything. So he had some kind of a device made on the entrance gate that if somebody from the outside would open the gate, that a weight would fall down and make a sound that somebody was coming. So when they were listening, my dad would always sit closest to the door to that passage so he could hear if somebody was coming, he'd be able to stop the radio in a hurry. Mum always had some buns or milk from the cows or something set up on the table, so it would look like there were guests in for a chat, but they weren't listening to anything. So that was a trick that I still remember."

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    Brno, 24.02.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 02:22:17
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - JMK REG ED
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I used to think of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia as an organization for adults

Miroslava Molíková in her 20s
Miroslava Molíková in her 20s
photo: Witness´s archive

She was born on 24 September 1928 in Mořice na Hané into a small farming family. She spent her childhood and youth on the outskirts of Mořice, where her family lived. During the World War II, the family listened to the banned BBC radio station (also due to the convenient location of the house outside the village centre). Miroslava Molíková spent the end of the war in the shelter of the malt house in Mořice. The German army made a machine gun nest out of her family home. The house was completely destroyed. The family lived in temporary premises for two years, and only in 1947 did they build a new house. Miroslava Molíková joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) in 1952. Between 1959 and 1965 she worked as an accountant in the district committee of the Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship Union in Brno. In the 1960s she made three trips to the Soviet Union. From 1965 to 1984 she worked in Vlnap in the cadre training department. During the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, she was returning from a holiday in Bulgaria. Today (2023) she is retired and lives in Brno, where she raised two daughters.