Ing. Eva Hozmanová

"The Charter was announced in January 1977 and I put the poster on the bulletin board in January 1977, that was the only connection. Of course Mr Disman who raised Pavel Kohout, Pavel Kohout probably had something to do with it too. All the time I had that poster... my supervisor came and told me that a secret police officer would come and interrogate me, but that it was not as bad as if I had been invited to a pub. He came and I was crying all the time, I was obviously scared by what they could do to me. I cried and made an even bigger fool of myself than I was. It turned out fine, except that I didn't get a raise until 1989, which was two and a half years [actually 12 and a half years], but I could stand that."

"In 1968, the Russians invaded us and destroyed a brand new road from Ústí [nad Labem] to Lovosice by driving tanks on it. We tried to make them lose their way in Lovosice by removing direction signs and house numbers. There were various signs all over Lovosice, and also in Chomutov where my six-year-old son was at the time, constantly scolding his grandmother for not knowing Russian, thus not being able to read the signs to him; he wanted to know. I told him on the phone that it said, 'Lenin wake up, Brezhnev has gone mad!' My mum said he wouldn't remember it anyway. We were glad they called because we hadn't had any telephone contact with them for about a week."

“So, one of my colleagues gave me a calendar from April ’69. So without even looking at it, yeah, you know, I don’t know if I would have even noticed anything about it, I hung it up there some time in April ’77, which was a big mistake. If it’d been earlier, it might have been such a problem. And on 30 April Miloš Disman was born, who brought up such excellent children like Karel Kyncl and Pavel Kohout. So someone took it up to the director and it was really a big deal. They interrogated me upstairs about who had given it me, and I just started crying. I mean, I didn’t want to betray my colleague, so what was I supposed to do... In the end it worked out okay, except for the fact that till eighty-nine I was denied any sort of promotion, I didn’t get a single extra crown for those whole twelve years. But I was really lucky that that officer there was, he was sort of lenient. The other one at the time was at a spa retreat for three months. Later on I got word from my colleague – not till eighty-nine – that the other one would have thrown me out of there within an hour. But, hey, I didn’t mean to put it up. But the funniest part of it was that they let me keep the notice board because the head supervisor who oversaw those notice boards was actually my boss.”

"I was at home because I had a six-year-old child. But I remember that; I guess we weren't asleep for some reason, I guess we'd heard the planes, I don't know. We turned on the radio and heard Hoffmann telling us not to panic and that there's nothing going on and so on. So, actually by the time we went to work in the morning, we knew it was over. I remember one very unpleasant thing: when the Russians drove their tanks in from Ústí, they ruined the newly built road, just destroyed it completely and it took two years to fix it. I remember a few things after that: we went to help harvesting the hops the week they took Dubček and co. to Russia. We would listen to transistor radios in the hop fields. Now some Soviet soldier wandered in with a tank, went around two or three times, and I can say that we were really scared."