Parents were united by resistance. She lost her mother in a concentration camp, her father was driven away by her grandmother.
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Milena Ručková, née Pětrošová, was born on May 8, 1940 in Frýdek-Místek. Her parents Marie Pětrošová and František Příborský joined the anti-Nazi resistance as smugglers in the Beskydy Mountains. Her mother was arrested by the Gestapo when she was pregnant. They let her give birth under supervision at home, then they locked her up in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died in 1942. Her father fled to Poland. He fought in the Czechoslovak foreign army and was severely wounded at Dunkirk. He got married in England during the war. In 1946, he came to Czechoslovakia for his daughter, but her grandmother did not hand her over to him. When Milena was thirteen, her grandmother died. She had to go to a children’s home, then she lived in Jablunkov for about three years with her uncle and aunt, who ran merry-go-rounds. At the age of eighteen, she joined Třinec Iron and Steel Works and worked there as a crane operator for seventeen years. She lived in Třinec, got married, and had three children. She divorced and moved to Staré Hamry in the Beskydy Mountains. After her second marriage to Miroslav Ručka, she moved to the mountain settlement of Těšiňoky. For about fifteen years, from spring to autumn, she grazed a large flock of sheep in the Staré Hamry area. In 2020, she discovered that she has five half-siblings in England. Until then, she had thought that her father had died soon after the war.
