Mgr. Magdaléna Mruškovičová

"Well, basically, what I read from those notes, they started pressuring us as soon as the communists took power. Basically, right in the fifties. In 1948, still in that year, ours, when we had the cowherd who worked for us, the butler, he betrayed my great-grandmother. He accused her of grinding more wheat than she was allowed. So, they condemned her. There is a criminal conviction for this. They immediately condemned her. He later used it as part of the pressure. That if anything, he'll end up in prison."

"It was a farm. If I go back to the present day, today the tax office for Prague 12 stands there. Right where that office stands our farm stood. There are two walnut trees left from that farmhouse where we used to play as children. Huge beautiful stout trees. They have a height of up to several floors of the financial house. So, those were our trees. A farm stood there, at that time it was the street of the Soviet Army. And the unlucky house number was 13/13. I don't know if that also brought bad luck. But the house is no longer there. The house itself was a big, beautiful, huge three-story barrack. It was built in 1928, with our farm being there even before that. It was an old farmhouse that still had a thatched roof. They demolished the old one at the turn of the century and built a new one. It is still so interesting, I remember that house, it was beautiful and rather monumental. In front of him was a linden avenue. My great-grandfather planted here. Yesterday I learned that from my dad an interesting thing about the farm. When the house was no longer ours, it was two or three years after the revolution when it was to be demolished. He just went to the municipality to solve some matter, he doesn't remember what. When he entered there, our house was being discussed. The decision was made about the demolition. The preservationists were strictly against demolition because they saw there the architectural elements of the rare, window cornice. About those entrance gates, big columns. They were simply against it. When dad saw that his house was being dealt with there, he spontaneously said: 'Hey, that's mine.' As he said that, the officials, whom he did not know at all, he thought were ex-communists, strictly said, that he has to tear it down. Until now, he blamed himself for being quiet that time. Maybe the house would still be there.”

"So he was in those legions and he came back. Dad still remembers it, so that's what he told me. So he came back in a terrible state; lousy, fleady, sick and dirty. So the first thing they actually did when he came home from Vladivostok, so he stripped completely naked in the garden, they just burned all his clothes so that any disease would not get to us. And he returned, actually scared in the sense that he had actually met the Bolsheviks there for the first time. He remembered the horrors and was terrified, and then for the rest of his life he was afraid they would come to us. He actually hid his rifle from the regime that when they came, he wanted to defend himself with a rifle. Well, he hid it, but he actually died in 1945 in March, so he didn't live to see the end of the war. Then the rifle was found, when our house was demolished, it was found in a grain cylinder. "

"We are still having a trial, we didn't get anything for the house - or just the redemption price, but the redemption price was like you would get three thousand for the house today. That I actually only needed a fraction of it, I don't know, you won't understand, but when a house is built, you actually have to take the building out of the agricultural fund. You pay a fee, which was around three thousand crowns. So we only got a fraction of the three thousand, so it was almost nothing. And we didn't get anything for that, because when they were evicted, everyone lost their documents. And there was a time when it had to be asked, we just didn't find it, it was even lost from the cadastre, so there was nothing to it, so we seemed to miss this. And then we didn't get anything for the land under the town hall where the cherries were, because the same thing was lost, the documents were lost, even the geometric plan in which it was separated was lost. And it was lost from the cadastre office too, so we just got nothing for it."

"Well, and then when we knew they were going to demolish the house, we actually built the house. From various loans, the parents somehow put it together. Well, and then it was actually there for another year or two before we moved here and demolished it all there. And we spent our free time after school going downstairs, we went there to watch. I had the cat there, we kept moving up here, about a kilometer on foot. We always brought him here and he always came back. So we moved him in a backpack, in a stroller, he always just ran away. And then it actually ended, this stage, that Honza once came up here, that we're already breaking it down. So we actually ran downstairs to watch them just tear down our house. And the last thing I remember is that I just looked where my cat Micák was and he just wasn't there anymore and I didn't actually see him anymore."