Libuše Hoznauerová

Emilie Locker, my mother, was a German from Sudetenland, born in Vienna in1905. She worked as a lady´s maid for the countess Cecilia Šternberg. My father came from a poor family of blacksmiths from Jelčany. His father and ancestors had been blacksmiths, but it was decided he would study. He completed the School of Forestry and then even university in a distance learning programme. At first, he worked as a forester in Zásmuky, because the second chateau of the Šternbergs was there, and later on he was promoted to Head Forester. When he worked in Častolovice, he met my mother, Mili Locker. She served the countess from 1929 to 33, when she married my father.

In 1985, when I left the job of a teacher at the ČKD apprentice school, I started to work at the Pedagogical Centre as a teacher trainer of English. To my horror, I realized that I had no idea what to do there. There were no books, no other teaching materials, and there was not even an English lecturer. We were not alowed to enter the British Cultural Centre in Jungmann Street, not to mention the US Embassy, where nobody dared to go. When a teacher did go there, he/she was immediately summoned up to the police. I myself had the courage to do so, but first I was in a pretty pickle at the Pedagogical Centre. The first deputy of the Soviet Minister of Education came for a visit, and each of the heads of school subject departments was supposed to ask him a question after the lecture. The Head checked that beforehand, and my task was to ask about learning languages. When it was my turn, I asked this comrade Russian which foreign language they learned in Russia, and he replied, English. I asked him: What do you say to the fact that here the whole nation has to learn Russian? A deadly silence followed. They called up a meeting of the KSČ; first they told me off terribly saying that I had compromised the whole Centre. They phoned the KSČ Central Committee and in the end‚ Štěpán, the main boss, told them: OK, let her stay then.

My grandfather Locker had a butcher´s shop in Vienna. My grandmother, who was Czech, went shopping there. They met and got married. My grandfather then was in WW I. His butcher´s shop went bankrupt, so after the war they returned to Rokytnice. He spent all the First Republic in Rokytnice. He couldn´t speak a word of Czech and when he went to the town office, a clerk had to speak German. In 1945, when there was the “Wild Transfer“, he was 74 and had cancer of the colon. The Germans from Rokytnice walked on foot, of course, and the Red Army took whatever they were carrying in their hands and carts. They walked across Poland to East Germany, both of which had been devastated. When my mother learned about this, she took action because the family was of Austrian citizenship, not German . At the office in Prague, she managed to obtain a document stating that as an Austrian, he should not have been transferred. She set out and walked from Rokytnice to Poland. People from the same village walked together; she kept asking, Which way did our family walk?, so she managed to find him. He was lying in a yard among hens and geese. She took him and they walked back to Rokytnice. A year later, my grandfather died.

In the year 1953, I graduated from the Pedagogical Gymnazium, which was a newly founded gymnazium (school) for teachers who were supposed to go to the Czech border area to build it up. We were given a placement for two years, I to Staré Křečany near Rumburk. After two years, I was so unhappy that when an inspector came and I told him I wanted to leave, he said, Well, my dear, you won´t get out of here.There were all kinds of students: Germans who were not transferred, Ukrainians, and children from Yugoslavia. I wrote a request to be released: I hate children, I have not taught them anything and I beat them! They pinned my ears back at the committee in Rumburk calling me a black stain on the teacher´s profession. They told me I would never be able to hold a responsible post. So, this was the way I got out of the border area back to Prague. I didn´t know what to do next but found out they needed an educator at the boarding house at Senovážné náměstí. When I told the director that he should expect terrible references, he laughed. I was 21. The references never arrived because the inspector never sent them off.