“I remember when there was this Anti-Charter, as much had been written about it recently. At that time I was at the secondary business school, and it was just horrible. Even today, I am ashamed. At our staff-room we had this huge table where people had been signing the Anti-Charter without even knowing what the Charter was about. Even I didn't know at that time, as I would find out later, when I got in contact with those materials. But the director would just sit down and say: 'Now we must sign that we don't agree with this,' and he would just pass it around. And everyone signed. And I had been watching them and I thought, after I got this paper, that maybe I would be able to learn something from it. But there was nothing, we had no clue what was in that Charter. So I would just pass it around. I didn't sign and I would pass it around. A colleague who had been sitting next to me said: 'But you didn't sign,' he had the guts to point it out. I just didn't sign and I was looking at those people. And I was so ashamed, for them, but nowadays, I would tell myself that I just didn't know what they had been going through. As they had families, they had children, they had this and they had that. I wasn't married at that time, I had no obligations. So I could afford something like that. And they didn't punish me in any way. Maybe later, when I was looking for a bigger flat, it could play its part. But apart from this, there was in fact no punishment.”
“And as I got this training as a court typist, and being quite good at that, I would be making copies quite a lot. As there were no copy machines back then. Those were yet to come. So every time I would make ten copies using the carbon paper. So the tenth copy was barely readable. But these ten copies were something you could do. So we would copy various materials for so many evenings, night after night, even the Charter, as I could remember, we were copying the Charter 77. But the interesting thing was when the copy machines started to show up. But only in a few privileged institutions, of course. And they would monitor all the devices, even mimeographs had been monitored. Then we found this company, where at night, we would... We got there thanks to my brother and his girlfriend who had been working there. Because machines in that company hadn't been monitored, so we would come at night and copy samizdat materials. I could still remember that, how we were sneaking through corridors to the copy machine. How scared we were, as there was a guard at the building. Well, it was an adventure. It was quite an interesting part of my life, and I kept all those materials, all the transcripts. It's quite a collection.”
“The breaking point, I would say, was Palach and his funeral. We attended the funeral, and it was just something unbelievable, it was one of the greatest experiences in my life, this funeral. The Old Town Square was full of people, there were all those dignitaries representing the university, with all those badges and insignia. It was such a dignified moment, there was so much pathos in it. It was such a profound experience indeed. And it has been with me ever since, as it had been one of the most intense experiences I ever had, and it just won't go away, I would say. That was the breaking point for many of us, I would say, as he died in protest, and at the same time, he tried to appeal to the people, so they wouldn't forget the ideas of the year of 1968. And I could witness it myself, how people were able to just forget, how everything returned to the old tracks, bit by bit, and most of all, people refused to even discuss such a thing. They wanted to forget, they wanted to fit in, they didn't want any trouble, they didn't want to be seen. So they started to live in a way, like they in fact did before, they started building summer houses, they invested their energy elsewhere. But that was just consumerism, this consumerist lifestyle which I always hated so much.”
Eva Koudelková, née Mikešová, was born on March 6, 1949 in a maternity hospital in Náchod, spending her childhood and youth in Hronov. Her great-grandfather, Josef Šára, was a protestant pastor and her relatives from the maternal side were practicing their faith even during the communist regime, while her father, Václav Mikeš, had been a devout communist. From 1964 to 1967, Eva had been studying at a grammar school in Náchod, wanting to become a journalist. In 1967, she started to study at the Faculty of Public Education and Journalism at the Charles University in Prague. She likes looking back at the times of the Prague Spring and only with great grief had she witnessed the transformation of the society after 1968 and also the changes at the faculty, as the people in charge had been replaced and the curriculum had been amended. She dropped out of university and moved to Beroun, finding a blue-collar job there. She had been working as a guide at the Karlštejn Castle and a court typist. Finally, she could start a distance learning program, studying Czech and English, then she started working as a teacher at an elementary school in Beroun. She took part in copying and distribution of samizdat literature. In 1984, she moved to Liberec with her family. Since 1990, she has been teaching at the Faculty of Education in Liberec. In 2000, she started ‚Bor‘ publishing house, publishing more than 200 books of regional literature.
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!
