Hannelore Kalenská

“They gave me an application form for the faculty of arts. I had written my desired fields of study there. I wanted to study Russian, probably together with Czech. But I was not admitted due to the reference letter, because they wrote there that my mom was partly inclined towards the West and that my father disdained the current political situation, and that both children – I have one sister – were not being raised in a socialistic society and that we did not participate in work brigades in our village... There were many such things; I still have the document at home. It also said that I appeared to be a foppish young girl, that I wore red and black stockings and things like that. We submitted an appeal to the district committee, but the gentleman, the comrade, who had written the assessment for me, had his brother at the district committee, and so they turned the appeal down. We went to the regional authority, but they rejected it, too, because his influence reached all the way there. Mom then went with me, and we complained in the president’s office, but they simply told me that I was allowed to study, but that I was only allowed to study dentistry or hygiene. I did not accept that, because I don’t like these fields of study.”

“The teacher asked us the names of our parents. When I said that my father’s name was Hubert, I think that the children in the classroom have never heard this name. It was not a particularly nice name, and I think that the children made fun of me a little bit. I wanted to have everything just like the other children, but we spoke in a different way at home and we spoke differently at school. As children we thus did not know where we belonged. Of course, when the other children wanted to become members of the Pioneer organization, I wanted to become a Pioneer, too. Eventually, we [with my sister] did not really show it, but we were not too happy that our father was a German and that we differed from the other children.”