"Terrible, it goes up so many stairs. One gate, the other, then up the stairs, there again a gate, maybe two or three, I don't know. And now there were tables, so Mom was sitting there and I was here and she was dressed in scary male clothes. She wrote about soap that she had nothing to wash herself with. And there was a woman there, a bachelor from Peršíkov, we knew her. And her mother said to her, 'Why are you imprisoning us here with women such as prostitutes?' And she said to her, 'This is the punishment!'"
"And when Mrs. Štěpničková was there, too, my mother, when she came home, she told us: 'She was so handy! She could totally entertain the women! Using the clothes and stuff they threw away she sewed up masks and dresses for theatre and kept playing.'"
"It was terrible. Marenka was angry with me for crying. 'Be quiet,' she admonished me, it was easier said. They were punished for nothing at all; they didn't care about him anymore, when they had all the fields and they still have them. And they can shove them to certain places..."
"When we had a nice threshing machine, we said, 'We're going to thrash it up nicely this year!' They came and took her and gave us an old shard, and we couldn't do the beating. They punished us like that, but that was before."
"They were inspecting us, the four guys who came from the district. Dad went to the farm buildings with one guy, there was a gendarme in the kitchen with my mother, and one with me who wanted to see the rooms and the pub was already closed. They had to show it, so they pounded the floor to see if there were any weapons. She [mom] was in the kitchen with the gendarme and the others were in the yard, they were gone. And he told her: 'If you have something you want to hide, then bring it and hide it. ' Mom said she had milk in a pot in the cellar. So she brought a ten-liter pot. She collected fat and made butter out of it. So she brought it, and he told her, 'Pour it into the sink, into the trash.' The gendarme told my mother. And then she was relieved and calm."
Jarmila Bartošíková was born on January 5, 1932 in Havlíčkův Borová (until 1949 the village was called Borová). Her father František Dvořák became the heir of the local brewery, where he stored and imported Pardubice beer to the surrounding pubs. In 1937 he crashed on a motorcycle and subsequently died of tetanus. After his death, his mother Aloisie married František Musil, who owned a pub and a butcher‘s shop in the village, and he also owned ten hectares of fields. When twenty hectares belonging to the brewery were added to this, they became the largest farmers in the village. During the war, František Musil was arrested and imprisoned because he had flour grounded illegally. Persecution accompanied the Musil family even during the 1950s. First, their machines were confiscated, the fields were replaced, and finally a house search took place. In 1958, the Musils were sentenced to imprisonment for damaging traffic by the district court in Chotěboř. Their daughters had to take care of the farm. Aloisie‘s mother was imprisoned in the Pardubice women‘s prison, where actress Jiřina Štěpničková was serving her sentence at the same time. After his father returned from prison, the state security offered him cooperation, which he vehemently refused. In the second half of the 1960s, the film Night of the Bride was shot on the premises of the brewery, capturing collectivization and the atmosphere of harsh communist ideology. At the time of filming, the witness lived in Havlíčkova Borová (2020).
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
