Vlasta Havlenová

“It was about the Cowards. My husband spoke about it, and somehow it happened that soon afterwards - I guess it was a senior student, who heard this assessment of Škvorecký, and he came somewhere to the university of education in Liberec and spoke of Škvorecký in the way my husband had. He was informed that this was wrong. Then it happened that an inspection visited the school and sat in on our classes. They chose the lessons of my husband and me. They didn’t go anywhere else. It seemed strange to us, but we didn’t think about it at the time. A number of years passed by, there was a class reunion, and one of my husband’s students started saying: ‘Professor, I assessed Škvorecký according to the way you told us, and I was given a right dressing down, and when I had to switch to the university in Ústí nad Labem for family reasons, I spoke of Škvorecký again, this time in the way the inspection said I should have, and I was given another dressing down, so now I don’t know what to think about it.’ This minor episode showed us the probable cause of that surprise inspection, when both my husband and I were called in for a talk, even though I taught at the second level of the eleven-year school and he taught at the third level - it was this.”

“They applied pressure in other ways. They set how much grain, potatoes, milk you should deliver according to the number of hectares you had. You also had to hand in cattle, pigs, and eggs. There were quotas for how much you were to deliver based on the size of your farm. What that meant for my dad was that when he handed in the grain, potatoes, milk, they calculated that he hadn’t fulfilled one hundred per cent of his quota, only eighty per cent of it, and so he had to pay a fine. So the money he was to receive for the grain wasn’t paid out to him because they were blocked and were used to pay the fine. The situation was the the only income of my dad, aunt, brother, and sister, who still lived at home back then, was that aunt’s pension, because Dad didn’t receive any of the money at all. That was a bad state of affairs.”