"Well, I was in Alcron [in August 1968], Alcron was full of foreign guests, journalists, everybody was asking us questions and what, there was a gathering of people on Wenceslas Square, but what was the use... So we were really scared, but what could we do? At that time, in 1948, or 1945, when the Russians came, we all welcomed them, we were happy! And then, when Benes had to dismiss the ministers, we said, well, maybe the communists are not so bad, since the Russians liberated us and the Germans went after the communists and arrested them, well, we fools voted for the communists in 1948. Who knew that as soon as we voted them out, the communists, a year later some army came in, said, we are the workers' army, and started marching. They gave the workers the guns, we had the state army and we still had the people's militia, they called it the workers' army. Well, it's incomprehensible that we allowed it at that time. But it was only because we really thought the Russians weren't so bad. They were and they are!"
"That first year, I got married in 1950, about January 10 or 12, and from the first of January it was decreed that there would not be only National Council wedding, that is, in the church, that there must still be a National Council. And I wasn't getting married in December to make it just in church, so I had to have the wedding first at the National Council. And now they didn't know how to do anything yet, so it was in some office, just the two of us went there, we didn't have any witnesses, so one doorman and some clerk went, and now as they didn't have it ready, they were planning that when there would be more weddings, when they started, that they would prepare a tape recorder, not a tape recorder, it was a record. And they started playing: Forward left! Imagine the wedding, we walked in, they pressed the record and played Forward Left, because they didn't have it ready yet. I was the first wedding at the National Council. But we were in civilian clothes, whereas the wedding was in white."
Milada Dagmar Vorlíčková, née Šulcová, was born on 23 November 1930 in Prague. She had two brothers and lived with her parents in Letná. She attended Junák and Sokol. She remembers the beginning of the war and the bombing of Prague on 14 February 1945. After the war, she graduated from a one-year school for women‘s professions, then studied at the Business Academy in Prague at Vinohrady. She married in 1950 and soon had her only son. She worked briefly in the factory kitchen, and after maternity leave she worked at the company‘s Restaurant and Canteen Directorate (RAJ), where she stayed for four years. Because her father had a business before 1948, she had to leave the company headquarters. She worked briefly at the RAJ outside Prague, then spent the next thirty years as a payroll accountant at the Alcron Hotel. Here she also lived through the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. From 1964 she led women‘s training in the Holešovice Sokol, and took part in five Spartakiads with them. She remembers November 1989 and the queues in front of the West German embassy in Prague. In 2023 she was living in Prague.
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!
