“He [architect Jan Víšek] was a great patriot and an admirer of Masaryk. Before that he’d travelled a fair bit. Well, and that became very unpopular later on. It was like a moral slap to the face when they told him: ‘Mister architect, you can do building supervision over here.’ And although he lived on 17 Na Kolišti Street, which is practically opposite the Janáček Theatre, he never entered that theatre and he fretted about it immensely.”
“There [in Božejovice], the - you could say - socialistic conditions were mainly supported by small farmers. Those who didn’t have their own estate. Because Grandma was strongly attached to the estate and to the land, she was devastated by it. She didn’t to want get in trouble, so the quotas she was required to fulfil, so she couldn’t afford to protest against it, to refuse to do what was ordered by the district. My two cousins who lived there as well, they never got any employment anywhere. because they were kulaks.”
Věra Žáčková, née Víšková, was born on 11 September 1931 in Brno-Židenice. Her father František came from South Bohemia, her mother Božena supposedly traced her lineage to the aristocratic family of the Zdeněks of Zásmuky. Inspired by her parents, Věra joined the Sokol movement. When the air raids on Brno intensified during World War II, her parents sent her to the countryside, to her grandparents in Božejovice, where she helped on their farm. After 1948 Věra‘s grandmother and her whole family were declared kulaks. The family farm was burdened with impossible mandatory quotas. After the war Věra attended business school; she later worked as a shop assistant and a shop accountant. In 1983 the Communist regime allowed her to travel to Switzerland, but first she had to formally renounced all her property. She married in Switzerland and settled down there. She worked in Zurich in a shop for pipe smokers on Bahnhofstrasse and also at a care home for the elderly. Věra Žáčková (in 2015) lived in a care home in Unhošť near Kladno. She died on 1 January 2020.
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