I will carry within me what they had done to my father, even if I stayed alive until a hundred years
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Jiřina Moravcová was born August 6, 1935 in Brno in the family of Jan Müller, who was the financial director of one of the largest agricultural companies in Moravia, the Joint-Stock Company for the Sugar Refinery Industry (ASPC). Her mother Julie was a housewife. Thanks to her father’s position, the family was doing quite well financially and Jiřina could thus enjoy happy childhood. ASPC continued its business operations even during the Protectorate, and the family’s life thus did not change much during the war, at least from the perspective of little Jiřina. Julie Müllerová must have experienced fear and uncertainty when her husband Jan was imprisoned by the Gestapo in Špilberk two times. Jiřina however did not suspect anything at that time, because she thought that her father was away on a business trip. After the war Jan Müller was appointed to an important position in the directorate of the Czechoslovak Sugar Refinery Industry and he was traveling back and forth between Brno and Prague as part of his job. The life of Jan Müller’s family became severely interrupted immediately after the coup d’état in February 1948. ASPC was taken over by a revolutionary committee and Jan Müller lost his job. For several weeks, members of StB secret police moved in to the house where the Müllers lived and the family, including the children, became isolated for that period of time. The disaster culminated when their apartment became confiscated and they moved to the family farm in Vyškov. Jan Müller planned to work there as a farmer, but soon after he was sent to a forced labour camp in Brno for two years for political reasons. He was released from the camp after a year and a half in December 1950 due to health problems. A year later the communist power impacted the life of Jiřina and her family once again, this time even more brutally. On December 26, 1951, Jan Müller was arrested in his home, while the rest of the family could only helplessly watch. The family then did not have any information about him and they did not know what happened. Only several days later they received a brief notice of his arrest from StB in Ústí nad Labem. They didn’t know, however, what their father was accused of and how long he would stay in prison. In July 1952 they received a single letter from their father. In September 1952 they received a notice of his death. Jan Müller died in pre-trial detention; allegedly he committed suicide. Only several years later Jiřina began to learn that her father had been charged with high treason in the process Pelikán and Co. and accused of supplying weapons to farmers in South Moravia. Soon after the whole group became sentenced, it became apparent that all these accusations were only fabricated on purpose.
