Mgr. Jarmila Kopečková

“We kept a track of the situation and saw the hopelessness here. Because as soon as the leading role of the Communist Czechoslovak Party was enshrined in the constitution, it was hopeless. And there was ‘the help‘ of the Soviet Union and we could not control it. What is now that we can say what we want, did not exist back then. Everyone kept their mouths shut, as they say. You simply did not present yourself without a reason because you would get into trouble.”

“The year 1951 was bad. I wrote a diary, so I remember it – we were the first class that had to do the so-called final exams. They were done before a committee and the committee directly decided who would study which school. I always wanted to study at grammar school and then to study medicine. I always had As and never had Bs. We had to go before the committee with my father in the afternoon and the committee could not say anything because of my school results but they said that my socialist education was not ensured at home and that I would have to go to working-class environment and that if working class sent me to study, I could study. So everything that I had imagined in my youth collapsed. And at the same time, they persuaded my friend, whose father was a fire fighter and who had Cs with big difficulty, to study. She cried that she did not want to and that she could not handle it.”

“The prosecutor confused legal terms back then. He did not know what tenure was. I quite admired my dad´s counsel, he managed to prove that the public prosecutor was off the mark. And so dad was sentenced to only one year. Instead of five years. The original proposal mentioned from five to ten years.”

“It was in 1956 or in 1957 after the events in Hungary when the communists were already backing off a little bit. Mrs. Schneblingová came to our office back then. They had a pharmacy opposite Malé Náměstí [a street in Prague – trans.]. Apart from that, they also had a pharmaceutical factory which had been nationalised in 1948. Back then, the nationalisation decree stated that only equipment used to run the factory were subject to it. However, they came to their house and confiscated also carpets and paintings from them and placed the things to a residence where leaders went on holiday. They placed it there as equipment. And my dad came to a conclusion that paintings and carpets did not serve for the permanent operation of the enterprise... Well and he got into a scrape. They came to arrest dad a week later.”

“I was telling Líba that I was not going that way that I was worried. Líba was running and all of sudden I could see planes in the sky. And as soon as I ran across, all hell broke loose. At first, glass started to fly due to a blast wave and then cobblestones. I was only kneeling and praying and I could only see a space over me with nothing flying in it. It was horrible, horrible. When you see the war films, I was in it. It was terrible. When the hell was over, I dug myself out. There was a lot of water and everything was smashed. There was nobody in the street, there were many people there before and there was nobody all of sudden. Only a woman was dragging a man and shouting that he could not walk. My legs and my head were hurting, a piece of my bone was knocked out. But fortunately, the skull was not fractured. I came to the entrance of the palace and there were two flaming bombs. I was absolutely terrified of it but walked past them and someone grabbed me there and pressed me to a column and then took me to a cellar and they treated my head there. I had everything covered in blood, my head was bleeding heavily. So they treated it and I went home when the bombing was over. I went home horrified if they were alive and secondly because my coat was ruined with blood and I was afraid that mum would be angry that I had ruined my coat.”