They completely destroyed our family
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Miloslava Müllerová was born on 27 December 1932 into the family of a farmer František Růžička. Her father’s family had been farming in the small village of Chlumec near Olešník for several generations. With 32 hectares of land, they were labeled kulaks after the communist coup in 1948 and were hard hit by the collectivization of agriculture. František Růžička, like several other Chlumec farmers, refused to join the emerging cooperative farm. For their resistance they were punished with liquidation supplies. Her brother František Růžička Jr. was assigned to the Auxiliary Engineering Corps (AEC) and spent two years working in the Barbora coal mine in Karviná. He returned home with poor mental health. She did not finish secondary school because she wanted to help her parents on the farm after her brother left for the military service, where only family members were allowed to work after 1948. In 1956, František Růžička was accused of sabotage and the communist jurisdiction sentenced him to five years in a camp, expropriated all the family’s property and displaced her father from the Týn nad Vltavou district forever. Their farm was liquidated. František Růžička spent most of his sentence in the Vojna labour camp near Příbram. Miloslava Müllerová visited her father several times in prison. In 1955, she married and left her family farm, and was unable to find a good job until 1989. She did not return to her family farm until after 1989. The confiscated property was restituted in the 1990s, but no one in the family was interested in working in agriculture anymore, so they sold the farm. The agricultural tradition that had been in the family for generations was destroyed by communist totalitarianism.
