Eva Vávrová

* 1946

  • "I think his name was Dvořák, the teacher, it was absolutely amazing, we absolutely devoured him. How beautifully he could deliver it, the stories, and you didn't have to learn it, we remembered it all. And he was just uncomfortable, so they cut him out of the school. Then in the third grade we had a teacher too, I liked her so much, she got cut too, and then she was only in the after-school program. Just whoever didn't have a good cadre profile couldn't be in the school, because he would probably teach some bad ideology or I don't know. Or the teachers who went to church, they got kicked out of school too."

  • "They didn't like to let me do it, but they were just scared at the time. When they saw what the comrades could do with these people, how they could bully them, they were afraid, so they let me do it. And I personally would have hated it terribly if they had forbidden it, because I desired to be among the children so much and that would have made me feel like an outcast again, although of course in two or three years I saw through that. That was sometimes, I don't know what grade you go to Pioneer in, sometimes second in third, I don't remember, but we were tiny. I wanted so badly to be a Pioneer too. And when I saw how we were being abused, we always had to go somewhere to sing and dance at all those celebrations of all those communist holidays, then I got tired of it very soon."

  • "My dad got a job somewhere, then got laid off again, so he tried again somewhere else, and again he got some menial job somewhere else, so they decided to move to Hronov. It wasn't much better there either. It was just that the cadre profile of these people was... they had a blot on their reputation like this and it went with them to the grave. So he didn't have any good jobs in Hronov either. I kind of remember that. One time he worked in the next village in Poříčí in Mezo, then he worked in Kovopodnik, then he worked in Tepna again, but always some kind of menial work and a few pennies for that."

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    Dolní Brusnice, 06.12.2018

    (audio)
    duration: 01:00:05
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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I’m doing well, wrote my uncle from prison

Advertisement for Eva Vávrová's parents' workshop
Advertisement for Eva Vávrová's parents' workshop
photo: The Stories of our neighbours project

Eva Vávrová, née Pozděnová, was born on 26 February 1946 in Úpice. The Pozděnov family owned a workshop for repairing tyres, rubber tyres and galoshes. The company was nationalized in 1948 and the father could not find a proper job since then. The family moved to Hronov, where Eva started school. Already in her childhood she perceived the injustice in the treatment of individual pupils according to the cadre criteria of the time. Her father died of cancer in the 1950s. Her uncle Bedřich Světlík ended up in prison in 1955 for political reasons. He was sentenced to 18 years. He spent five years in prison in Leopoldov and Valdice and was released in 1960 thanks to an amnesty. However, as a former prisoner, he also had problems finding work and died of cancer in the 1970s. Eva married and moved to Dolní Brusnice, where they renovated their house.