“That was horrible. [My husband] was serving with the military in Plzeň at the time, and they handed them rifles. They never got to shoot before that. They stood them up opposite the protesters in a square in Plzeň; crowds were opposing the military and, God knows, everyone. He feared they’d be ordered to shoot at the people. Those where such times you never knew what would happen next.”
“I think we were in our fifth year in high school when this huge air raid hit. When it was over, trucks arrived at school. They were going through classrooms. Our boys were 15 at the time. They came to a classroom and picked the bigger and stronger boys to go with them. They gathered a truck full of the big boys in the morning. Then they took them to Hodonín. They were forced to retrieve the dead and clean up after the raid. My husband, my schoolmate at the time, was there too. The boys couldn’t get over the horrors they’d seen for days, the dead bodies and so on. It has all been forgotten since. We had been doing air raid drills, running along the road in Strážnice, or marching really fast. Our PE teacher ran along on the walkway, and we would run past the Veselí Gate and the railroad tracks. There, we would lay down and wait until the airplanes would be gone.”
“I met the smartest of my former schoolchildren in Veselí in a factory that produced something with cotton in it. I went there with my class to show them what the plant made. Those smart girls would say hello and approach me, and I just wanted to cry. I envisioned them to become future physicians and professors. Yet, there they were, working this gnarly machine in an unhealthy environment. That made me mad, you know? Those smart children were not admitted because their neighbour was a communist, and he was envious of them because that smart girl was a better student than his dumb son. In the end, those smart children took the wrong end of the stick.”
Milada Rejmanová, née Majkutová, was born in Veselí nad Moravou on 21 April 1929. As a child, she was a member of the Sokol, used to sing, and was friends with Count Chorinský’s daughter Medina. The Majkut family’s house was damaged by the Nazis in April 1945, forcing them to live in a laundry for several months. Milada Rejmanová passed her school-leaving examination at the Purkyně High School in Strážnice in 1948, then graduated from the Faculty of Education of Masaryk University in Brno. As a teacher, she first worked at the primary school in Lipov near Hodonín, then in Hroznová Lhota, Veselí nad Moravou, and then at the high school in Strážnice. In the 1950s, she was a member of a canvassing team that convinced farmers to join the cooperatives (JZD). She married František Rejman in 1953 and son Jiří was born within a year. Husband František worked as a primary school headmaster, first in Blatnice pod sv. Antonínkem and then in Komenského Street in Veselí nad Moravou. He lost the job in the early 1970s after signing a letter of protest against the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies. Milada Rejmanová was rewarded with a trip to the Soviet Union for her lifelong dedication to her teacher job in 1985. Following her husband’s death, she started focusing more intensively on singing with the Libuše choir, taking over the baton from choirmaster Ludmila Zimovčáková in 2000. The witness was living in Veselí nad Moravou in 2022.
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