"And I finished the papers, printed them out, and carried them to Dienstbier's cabinet, which was because Dienstbier had nowhere to live. So, hopefully I won't say anything bad, he lived with Dana Huňátová in Masaryk's apartment. So, I went to Masaryk's apartment at six or seven o´clock in the evening and begged that it has to go to the government and if he would be so kind as to sign it. He was, it was late in the evening, and he said - Are you a secretary here? Of course, he didn't remember our meeting on the stairs of the Faculty of Arts. I said heroically - I am not a secretary, I am a diplomat, a clerk for the Maghreb in the Middle East. He looked at me like that, not at all cheerfully, and said - And how do you feel about it and how do you like it? It suddenly exploded in me, and I began to yell at him that if he would protect the terrible communists, the State Security officers and KGB officers and all these people, that I would be gone in a month, that it was unbearable, and that it pisses me of terribly. And that he seems to be a part of it and he doesn't do anything about it, but a anything at all. He really got it from me badly."
"And because I was the youngest teacher, Professor Marcela Kubišová came to see me. She quite liked me and she was a sinologist, a communist like hell. She said - you know, there will be a student parade on Friday, we would need pedagogical supervision there. So, if you could go there, comrade colleague. So, I´m probably the only person who was sent there ex officio. I had someone on a side at the time, so I was doing something very different and I came late, when the parade went down to Vyšehrad, I met a couple of high school classmates there and we chatted about that I hadn't been there for a long time, who, where, with whom, where to. So, we talked and talked and we came exactly to the level of Mikulandská. Suddenly Hana Katzová, her name was already different, so she went with me, she said - turn around. And that was the moment of realizing when one understood that there was nowhere to go. And we're just - Dddddddd. So, I didn't even protest. I tried to get out through Mikulandska. A policeman was beating me with a baton and I fought with him, then he let me go. But he hit my kidney, which was good, I'm very fierce temper and it pissed me off."
"It is a very long time ago. It was terrible in that primary school, I remember, I saw it differently for some years, I had to define myself against my own nation. I haven´t felt like that for a long time nowadays, because in the meantime I also experienced other terrible things. However, I remember one of the first things was that I undressed before PE class. I used to live on the beach, and when we changed our clothes, so we changed. Now, imagine a child coming from Africa and being at a normalization elementary school before the start of physical education, a little girl undresses naked, it was great. But it wasn't that bad. We had a teacher Mrs. Valíšková and the day before Christmas I told her that I had to go home, because Ježíšek would come to our place and I had to help. Mrs. Valíšková explained to me that there is no Ježíšek and no one will come to our place. I was so deeply convinced of my things then that I told her – Mrs. teacher, if he doesn't come to your place, you must have misbehaved, but we were kind and he will come to our place."
Jana Hybášková was born on June 26, 1965 in Prague in the family of a female doctor and a vet. She spent part of her childhood with her parents in Algeria, where her father worked. The family returned to Prague in 1971. Already during her studies at the grammar school, she began learning Arabic. She studied Arabic at the Faculty of Arts at the Charles University. As a student, she began interpreting Arabic and became secretary to the Iraqi ambassador. She was on a study stay in Egypt. In September 1989, she began teaching Arabic studies at Charles University. She took part in a student demonstration in Prague on Národní třída on November 17, 1989, after which the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia began. She was beaten a lot with batons there. At the faculty, she then worked in the strike committee. In December 1989, she took a train to Romania with the humanitarian aid and experienced the shelling by militants of the collapsing Nicolae Ceaușescu regime. In 1990, she joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in 1992 she was appointed the Director of the Middle East Territorial Department, where she had over 400 subordinates. She laid off tens of employees who worked with the State Security or KGB (the Committee for State Security). She married sociologist Ivan Gabal. They had two daughters. In 1997 she started working as an ambassador in Slovenia. She returned to Prague in 2001 and worked in the team of Pavel Telička, which was preparing the Czech Republic‘s accession to the European Union. In 2002, she became an ambassador in Kuwait and Qatar. Besides other things, she was also working on deploying Czech chemical force to the Second Gulf War against Saddam Hussein. In 2004, she succeeded as a candidate of the SNK European Democrats for the European Parliament elections, where she served until 2009. She was the chairwoman of the European Parliament Delegation for relations with Israel. From 2011 to 2015, she worked as the European Union Ambassador in Iraq. From 2015 to 2019, she held the same position in Namibia. In 2020, she lived in Prague and was employed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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!
