Libuše Kozáková

"We had a tapped phone, of course. We didn't have a phone for a long time and then we had this nest, there were five other parties besides us. And every time it was the anniversary of August - the whole month of August, we didn't get a phone call. But neither did they. And they had a terrible riot, these people, and they called the telecommunications and found out that there was a cable failure. And by September, the phone was back on. So we had it bugged, we had a TV set - Multiservice it was called - we had a TV set rented, and Charles got a message that we had a bug. So we returned it. And the next day a guy came in with a bag and said, 'Your TV's not working, I'm going to fix it for you,' and Karel said, 'We've already put it away.' That's how it was."

"In August 1968 we went on holiday with Karel and Ivanek to Bulgaria - I don't know if it was Zlaté Písky, there was a party holiday right by the sea and we had a wonderful time there. But Karel was leaving for Prague on August 17, he was going to prepare the XIVth Congress. He was taken on the plane by a friend of his, Salgovic, who was also preparing something, but we didn't know what - that he was going to prepare the arrival of the Red Army. So Karel was gone and I stayed with Ivan at Zlate Písky. And now 21 August came, and we came to the dining room in the morning, and there were flags on the Soviets' tables and champagne was popping, because 'big event - we have occupied Czechoslovakia'. There was a party secretary from somewhere in the countryside sitting at the table with us, and she had sewn our Czechoslovak flag out of her shorts. She was terribly reprimanded for being rude, so she took it down. We were completely without news. Someone had a transistor, so we sat with it by our ear on the beach in the evening, listening, and I was quite desperate because I wondered what was wrong with Karl. Either he's been locked up, or he's been shot, or he's done something to himself, because a chunk of his life has gone down again. And then one evening I managed to call Mark at Spořilov and it turned out that Karel was just there at the moment, hiding. So I talked to him, and that calmed me down. And now the recreation was for a whole month, but we couldn't go home because there were no planes, no trains, nothing."

"The year 1968 came, Čestmír Císař became party secretary and pulled out those people he knew who were with him for the first time at the UV and whom he knew from Nová Mysl and so on, so he pulled them out. So Karel became the head of the cultural department, Jiří Čutka became Císař's secretary, Dušan Havlíček, our long-time friend, he became, I think, something through the press or something like that, and now they were just working there and I was desperate. By 1968, after many exchanges and adventures, we managed to get this apartment. And now I was really desperate, because I was smart enough to know that it wasn't going to work out, that the Russians wouldn't let us. And of course Karel knew that too, but he also knew that they had to try. So they tried it, he set up a "cultural asset", if you remember, he had Werich there, all the important personalities who really wanted to ride on his new party policy and so on. Well, and it just ended up all wrong, as we all know."

"I experienced a terrible thing. Among other things, I was friends with Milan Jariš and Dita Skálová. They were married. We visited them once, or they visited us, I don't remember. And they told us funny stories from the concentration camp. Dita Skálová told how the Red Cross had supplied them with liners, which they sort of handed out at the appellplatz. And they were all laughing. Because - what about them? Nobody had had them there for years! It's just that starvation and hard work and conditions will undo all that. So they tied it like a shoelace, like a string around their feet. And Jaris had another funny story about how the Red Cross made sure they had to get vitamins. So on a similar appellplatz, everyone got a huge onion. And they had to eat them raw on the spot. They laughed so hard. And I was stiff. I just nearly cried because they were terrible stories. I'm still touched today. They were great people. And can you blame them for being communists? You can't."

"The year 1938 came and my father had to enlist. He was in Jihlava, and there is some very interesting correspondence from that mobilization, because in Levice, which was near the Hungarian border, and even a Czech cavalry regiment was stationed there, practically nobody knew what was going to happen, not even the soldiers. And my mother, while my father was in Jihlava, just this twenty-seven-year-old woman with a three-year-old child had to decide what to do. So I was sent to my aunts in Přerov, and she managed to order a railway carriage, load the furniture in there, move it to Přerov, and stayed alone in Levice. The teacher's institute then moved to Nová Bana and Levice simply went to Slovakia. The situation there was very tense, which is clear from the correspondence, because the Czechs were suddenly the bad guys and the Slovaks naturally wanted to throw them out, it was like, 'Czechs, out.' And in November 1938 my mother was in Nová Baná and my father got a terrible cold and had to go to Přerov to see his family. On the way, the Hlinka Guards stopped the car, he had to climb out in high fever, and they made searches to see if he was carrying any money from Slovakia. And then he got to Přerov in such a state that he was taken to the hospital the next morning. He had purulent angina, which developed into total sepsis, and there were no antibiotics at that time, so he actually died of it within a few days."

"His dad was the head teacher Jan Kozák, he taught in Moravia, his father was born in Ubušín. This grandfather wrote one of the first Czech arithmetic books and it received a silver medal at the Jubilee Exhibition in 1891. And as far as I know, it was still being taught in the 1930s (with a co-author). I even got a copy of that textbook for first grade at an antique store, and he even drew pictures for the kids in there. And they were evangelicals, they had five of these kids, and they were all educated. The oldest aunt Libuše, after whom I am named, was a teacher, the second aunt Vlasta was a doctor, one of the first female doctors in Bohemia. And then there was my uncle Jan, who was a lawyer, my father, who was a talented painter, and they figured it out in high school, but my grandfather insisted that he have some kind of job that would support him. So he went to architecture, where he studied for two years, and then he went to the Academy of Fine Arts, where he was a student of Professor Vratislav Nechleba. So he painted very realistically. And he also had to have pedagogical exams in order to teach. And he was assigned to Slovakia by the Ministry of Education for a change."