Jiřina Tóthová

"The Czechoslovak Republic was restored... Yes. With the fact that her mother had no reason to have a relationship with her because she came from the Soviet Union. So I don't know if maybe somehow those father's memories were preserved through her, or maybe how he perceived the restoration of Czechoslovakia. Well, he perceived it very well, because he liked it very much. Just my mother had big problems because the Russians wanted her to return to Russia. But there were practically three children and she refused. Every year, every year...she traveled to Prague, to the Russian consulate. Every year they persuaded her that she had to leave, that she had to return to Russia. She simply persistently resisted. The last time she was in Prague...I was twenty-one years old, and that was in sixty-eight...that was before August. I was there with her...my brother was also there with me, Peter. We were with my mother... so that was the last time, and then she told them that no... that she has children here, she has a family here, she will stay here. And she came to us completely shaken, from the consulate...in tears. And she said that the consul grabbed her by the neck, just by her clothes...and said that she should get out, that she would...she wouldn't have any citizenship, that she would be like a homeless person, but that he didn't want to see her here anymore. That's when it ended, but that's when my mother applied for Czech citizenship, and she got it. She got it because she had been there for a very long time, so... Because before, she couldn't... she couldn't, because the Russians kept preventing her from doing it. So she was still led as a Russian... it didn't break until the sixty-eighth, before the attack by those waxes and then... she just had peace after that, she didn't have a problem anymore. Of course, I digress a bit... that when the girls scattered, she tried to find them and through the Red Cross, she succeeded. She succeeded... so she found the one sister in Kyrchyz, the other one in Mahadan, and the one who was in France, so they told her there that she had died. And then... For any health consequences? No, in the war...in the war. She died as a result of the war. So then... through the Red Cross she tried... she went, she traveled to see that sister. Her name was Dusia... To Kyrchyzek... To Kyrchyzek, yes. She was even at our place with her husband. "

"And actually, to cross the line... Yes. As your parents recalled... they were already together. They remember the crossing of the front very badly, because the convict camp passed through Tachov, it was the so-called death march, and they took the convicts from the concentration camps to Germany. It went through Tachov, because Tachov is practically adjacent to Germany and many, many… my mother even found her uncle there who was in that concentration camp and was in that march. She has incredibly bad memories of it, because as soon as one convict fell, or was not in control, he was immediately shot and left there. That those were very, very cruel memories. Well, she tried somehow to get in touch with that uncle, that they tried to help him somehow, but that they had no chance because the convicts were being guarded. And that was the worst march ever...through Tachov when he went. That was very terrible."

"I would still...that's okay, but I would still ask...that your mother experienced the Soviet Union... Yes. In the twenties, thirties... Yes. And it basically came into existence just before she was born... Yes. Because there was a civil war... I would ask how she remembered her childhood in that area... what it was like in the Soviet Union. Well, she initially described her childhood as nice. They were the so-called kulaks. They had a huge economy...they had an awful lot. Only, after the disruption, after everything... they took everything from them. They were just complete poor people. It was very difficult for her to remember, because she said that there were groups of so-called banders... and they robbed, mugged people... they simply killed. That she has such scraps of memories that when she was eleven years old...she had to go very far, because they lived in a village, and she had to walk very far for bread...for food, and she always had to go at night, because there was a very long queue to everyone got away with it. So they went... so there were such ambushes that the banders simply killed children, killed people... It's embarrassing for me to talk about it, but my mother told me that, that's how they told me that they normally sold it like meat, those people … that it was, very… very tragic. And one night, when my mother also went to stand in line for the bread, she went alone... and heard some footsteps behind her, so she hid as best she could. Well, in the end, the oldest brother, Peter, went to her... who practically saved her, because he met those gangs there and ran after her when my mother's mother said that she went to stand in line for a sandwich. Such experiences are very difficult for her...she said that it was something terrible, that what was happening in that Russia, that it was...it was a huge region and yet it wasn't...it wasn't settled, there were simply empty spaces there, completely empty. The fields were covered with ice, simply fertile soil, extremely fertile, because there is black soil, so if everyone tried, they would have a very difficult life. If I may ask since you mentioned that they were such bigger landowners… Yes they were. And that's exactly when the kolchozy were made... Kolchozy. Exactly kolchozy. Kolchozy, yes. And that as it happened...probably not voluntarily. They probably got there... in particular, that the Soviet officials probably used to go there. They came, the officials came...they persuaded. Practically my grandmother...like my mother's mother, she did not want to join the kolkhoz in any case, but my father, as a husband, persuaded her that it would be good and so on. Well, but it was very bad because everything was taken from them. "