"When I went to the island of Mutondwe, we were told at the airport that they can't accommodate us in the place where we were originally supposed to live, because President Kaunda was coming with the government delegation. So they put us on a bus and took us to a tourist resort. The wife of the director of the World Bank was also accommodated there. In the evening, they organized a big reception for us on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. I became friends with the director's wife and we got a little drunk together – we were composing poems together. In the morning, I had a desire to take a swim in the lake – the water was wonderfully clear. When I got pretty far away from the shore already, they began firing flares. I thought that the president must have arrived. Suddenly, three boats set off from the shore. They pulled me up into one of the boats and said: 'stupid woman, a six-meter-long crocodile lives in the lake!' No one believed that I would make it out alive."
"My dad welcomed them – he was a bit of a left-winger and studied Russian. He even invited them to our flat in Bubeneč. But when that Russian officer looked around, he gave my father such a look and said: 'Arnošt, ty buržuj!' ('Arnošt, you're a bourgeois!'). We had a rather poorly equipped apartment, but for him, it was a flat of a man who could never become a friend of a true Communist."
"A large group of Russian soldiers settled on the estate. The chef liked me – I was a cute golden-haired girl. He would feed me with bread with jam and sardines. But otherwise they pretty much ravaged the place. They slaughtered our cows and littered the yard with their insides. In their little houses, they made fires and used the wooden furniture as fire wood. When their general was about to come for a visit, they brought sand into the park and made sand paths along which they arranged palm trees. In the evenings, they used to play the 'cuckoo' in the summerhouse. They put six bullets in the pistol – one of them was live – and they passed it around. We heard the shots and we were terrified, but no one got killed, as far as I know."
"My father had a lot of awards and he was perhaps the only person in the world that I know of who was given a medal for having constructed the Stalin monument and a medal for its demolition. He had to calculate the size of the charges and where exactly to put them so as to make it safe when Stalin's head made of concrete will be rolling down the slope. He was very proud of both of the medals and would show them whenever we had a visit by some foreigners."
photo: současné Mikuláš Kroupa, dobové archiv pamětníka
photo: současné Mikuláš Kroupa, dobové archiv pamětníka
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Milada Vavrdová, née Dvořáková, was born on 25 April, 1938, in Prague in the family of the architect and geophysicist Arnošt Dvořák. Her grandfather, Josef Záruba-Pfeffermann, an architect (the power plant in Prostějov, the observatory in Ondřejov, participated in the construction of the Czechoslovak border fortifications) and politician (the Czech Progressive Party), bought an estate in Cholín after the First World War, where the whole family often stayed. Milada met Red Army soldiers here, who settled down in Cholín for some time at the end of the war. Since her childhood, she was a member of the Boy Scouts. Some of the older scouts from her section were put on trial for anti-resistance activities in the beginning of the 1950s. She studied geology. In 1967-1972, she lived in Zambia, where she and her husband, Ivo Vavrda, carried out geological exploration. In Africa, their third child was born. Ivo Vavrda was killed in an automobile accident before flying back to Czechoslovakia.
