"I actually remember how the teacher Mrs. Maršíková introduced us to the one-child policy, in China, how well they figured it out there. It made me sick even at the lower grades. In those classes, I perceived it [propaganda] in civics, in Russian. It physically made me sick, the bullshit."
"Of course there were rumours among people in Pardubice. The university was also very nice to them and stood up for them. Because they [the students] also formulated some demands, what they wanted and didn't want. Among them there was that they didn't want to learn Marxism-Leninism. The school wanted to stand up for them, to soften the accusation, so they wrote that the students hadn't wanted to cause any uprising, that they had just wanted to discuss the curriculum."
"At a student meeting they whistled and shouted: 'Shame!' Exactly how the meeting was going on, what they were whistling and shouting 'shame' against, I don't know. But it was something to the effect that they were to approve the 'friendly' aid of army troops to Hungary. So they started whistling and shouting 'Shame!' Then another one of them wrote a letter saying that the protests must spread, that the student movement must act across the countries. He wrote a letter to a student girl in Prague to that effect. Then they were arranging that if there was a student May festival, they would also have the program there where they would speak in the sense that they were protesting against these events."
"Dad was rehabilitated." - "In '68?" - "Yes. He got paid about twenty-six thousand and some securities still. Later the rehabilitation was declared wrong again, so he had to pay it back. He had received twenty-six thousand at that time, it's written in the papers. They repaired the boiler at home with that money, made a gas boiler, heating system. Then he had to pay it back. He said he didn't have any money. My mother was on maternity leave with me, I was already born, 1971. My sister is older, born in 1968. They told him he had to pay it back. He didn't have any money, so he asked if he could pay it back in installments, the rehabilitation. Then they had a negotiation at the Ministry of Finance and there was an official there who had extreme sympathy for injustice, so he tried to make it conform to the interpretation of the law at that time. So that Dad would pay it back, but it would hurt as little as possible."
Martina Kotyková, née Levá, was born on 18 May 1971 in Pardubice to Eva and Pavel Levý. Her father, as a student at the then University of Chemical Technology in Pardubice, expressed his opposition to the suppression of the Hungarian uprising at a student meeting in 1956. Because of this, he was sentenced to two years in prison in a trial along with six other classmates. He served his sentence in the uranium mines in Jáchymov and Bytíz near Příbram. During the Prague Spring of 1968, the state rehabilitated Pavel Levý and paid him compensation. However, at the beginning of the normalisation period, the rehabilitation was cancelled and her father was ordered to repay the amount. He did not have the money, so he was still repaying the sum in 1989. Martina Kotyková did not face any problems because of her father‘s past. She graduated from a secondary technical school of electrical engineering. As a student at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University, she took part in the demonstration on 17 November 1989 at Národní Street. During the Velvet Revolution she travelled around the country with her classmates and reported on events in Prague. Since 1997 she was living in Nové Strašecí.
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!
