Zdeňka Křížová, rozená Hnitková

Since 1948 we, who all had been living in the house my grandfather had built before the war, had to face threats from some street committees whose interest was to throw us out of the house and move in something else, God knows what – some rumours said a kindergarten. I am not quite sure. What happened was that constantly some house confidante kept coming to our house. They wanted to see its size, if this or that could fit in and if it´s not too large for the number of people living there. We were six in the house. We, children, were strictly forbidden to open the door to anyone. The rule made it a matter of principle not to let anybody in, to prevent anyone from seeing the house for what it actually was. Finally, we managed to keep the house, we stayed there and towards the end of the 1950s these inspections stopped. I started school in 1946. I remember we had religion classes for the first two years but then they were cancelled, that means it was until 1948. During the war but also after 1948 we had a housekeeper. I remember the one who sang moving songs. I sang with her and liked it. She also took me to school, which I hated a lot. All the housekeepers were nice, especially Mařka. The housekeepers remembered us with fondness and visited us long time after the war had ended. We visited Mařka too. She, in the beginning, was a housekeeper with my grandmother Marešová who passed her on to my mother and then Mařka with Alois, her husband, lived in our house in the basement. My mother´s upbringing didn´t include the art of housekeeping, tidying the house or cooking. She had to learn all this by doing after the housekeepers had gone in 1948. She was hopeless especially with money matters. She was used to dealing with larger amounts.

I´ll get back to the end of the war in 1945 and have to mention that in fact after the air raid we could not live in our house because the roof was damaged and probably the statics was destroyed. Nevertheless the house was standing unlike the neighbouring houses. My grandfather and grandmother moved in to our place from the distillery, which was damaged too, no wonder. And to make matters worse, my grandfather had to leave the post of the manager of the distillery after 1945. He was thrown out of the job referring to the Beneš Decrees as local people claimed that he had made friends with the Germans. The truth probably was that a lot of German officers and soldiers had visited the distillery, a rather attractive place for the Germans, and asked my grandfather to send his employees to work in the Reich, which he never did. He managed to keep all his employees off the Reich. Anyway, after 1945 or perhaps in 1946, I am not so sure, he was kicked out and came to live with us. As I said before, we couldn´t live in our house and had to move to a nearby village Olovnice where a relative of ours, Ing. Brejník, an owner of a mill lived. He was helping people throughout the war giving them some flour whenever he could, which helped them survive and, of course, he met the same fate as my grandfather. After the year 1948 he was not only expelled from his mill but also deprived of his property. Until the year 1948 my grandfather, being a chemistry engineer, worked at a research institute in Prague. After that he remained completely without any means. He was refused any retirement pension. My grandmother, who was not accused of any so-called wrongdoing, was later granted some 100,- crowns. So from the start they had no means to support themselves, money was of no value of course, so the only thing they could do was to sell gradually out all their belongings. Carpets, furnishings, etc.