Vlasta Šolarová

* 1931

  • "And I immediately started going... to continue in Sokol. I joined the fire department, I joined the choir, I did theater. I was busy! I always took bread and lard for dinner, and I went right away: I'm going to exercise or join these organizations. But most of all to the exercise. And in 1949-1950 I guess I was... because the old Sokol officials were fired by the commies and they got some officials to run the Sokol in Sázava. But for someone to train or know how to train - they didn't have that. And they made me chief. Please, I didn't realize what I was doing! But I couldn't say no, could I? I didn't want to either, because I was interested in the exercise. And I didn't care what was going on around me, practically."

  • "To Lanškroun, there was a small glassblowing company called Zídek, Mr Zídek was the manager. And I worked there as a clerk. I don't know how long it lasted, but it must have been in 1948 or maybe early 1949, because the Communists took it from him. They fired him, they fired the employees, the glassblowers - and do whatever you want. Fortunately, from Sázava came the company director, ing. Brabenec, who called the workshop there: and whoever would like to work in the Sázava glassworks should come and see it. It turned out that a few of the glassblowers went with us and there were only a few of us. And I mainly went too. I went to Sázava. I was a romantic girl, eighteen. And I came to Sázava. It was September. The hillsides here in Sázava were beautifully coloured, because there's a mixed forest. Or forest - that's rock. Now the river was roaring. I could smell it all, it was beautiful. So of course I said I'm going to go there."

  • "Mom had chickens. Dad raised rabbits, too. We had goats because goat's milk was our staple food during the war. And my mother had a garden. And Dad had bees. He built a nice apiary, a little house for the bees. He had a room there and the beehive, the bees were just in the front, outside. And the apiary... I used to go there as a girl to learn, because it was the only place I had space and peace and the bees were buzzing beautifully and the whole room smelled of honey."

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    Praha, 15.06.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:31:49
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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When I could, I liked to be active

Vlasta Šolarová, 1949
Vlasta Šolarová, 1949
photo: Archive of the witness

She was born Vlasta Faltýsková on 21 November 1931 in the village of Horní Čermná near Lanškroun. The purely Czech village fell to Nazi Germany in September 1938. Her father went to nearby Lanškroun after the end of the war to guard captured Germans; however, he refused to take part in the brutal revenge carried out by the partisan People’s Court on the German population there. Vlasta Faltýsková had already trained secretly in the Sokol club in Čermná during the war and later became a member of the East Bohemian - Pippich Sokol County in Chocen, with which she took part in the last Sokol meeting in 1948. At the request of her parents, she did not finish secondary business school and joined the glassblowing company Zídek in Lanškroun as a clerk. After the nationalisation of the company by the communists, she moved to Sázava at the age of 18 and found another job at Kavalier Glassworks in Sázava. In Sázava she continued her previous Sokol activity and after the current management was thrown out during the communist purges, she took up youth training. In 1952, she married Zdeněk Šolar, who had been forcibly deployed in Germany during the war, underwent firefighting training there and participated in the extinguishing of bombed German cities. In 1953-1959, the Šolars lived in Vyšší Brod in the border area, where Zdeněk Šolar worked as a construction manager at the Lipno II waterworks. Afterwards they returned to Sázava and both worked at the Kavalier Glassworks. In 2023 Vlasta Šolarová was living in Sázava.