"In the fall of 1938, when I was five years old, I began to understand that something quite unusual was happening. In Lety there was a newly built bridge over the Berounka River, and a few local citizens used to gather on that bridge to watch the cargo trains going from Prague to Pilsen. There were soldiers there, and also artillery guns, and that group of older men who used to stand on the bridge, amongst them the mayor, a very respected person, they were saying, 'We'll defend ourselves, we won’t tolerate this.' After a few days the trains changed directions. Back then I didn't understand why. But this group of men was there again, and they weren’t saying anything, they were standing there looking rather puzzled. But as a five-year-old child I was most touched by the fact that the mayor was crying. That's when I began to understand that something had broken in the Czech nation when the Munich Agreement was issued and the Sudetenland was handed over, that’s when everything that had been built up over those twenty years was destroyed."
"I went to Prague about three days later, and that was my greatest experience from the invasion. We took a train from Smíchov to Beroun, before Prague the railway goes around the Zbraslav road. And when we arrived, there were tanks on that road, one after another, and all their barrels were aiming at Prague. And the people on the train were watching it, they were all there like dead, nobody said a word. And I was also taken aback by the situation. You know, seeing a line of tanks on that road, when they all aim at Prague!"
"Anyone who hasn't lived through it can't even imagine it, because suddenly there were national meetings - people started talking about who was persecuted, who was imprisoned, how many people were executed. And one time the soldiers who fought in foreign forces had a meeting, and it was filmed, the whole hall, they were wearing uniforms, and then somebody said, ‘Those who were persecuted after the forty-eighth, please stand up,' and the whole hall stood up. Those soldiers fought against Germans during the war and then they were persecuted again."
Jarmila Kubíková, née Nováková, was born on February 12, 1933 in Prague. Her father, Karel Novák, a prominent lawyer from Prague, worked for the resistance movement during the war and in the beginning of 1945 he was arrested. He was imprisoned in Pankrác and in the Terezín Small Fortress. Jarmila was influenced by reading popular science literature describing the new research in microbiology so much that she decided to deepen her knowledge and started to attend a university. In 1951 she passed the entrance exam, even though her political profile was badly affected by her father‘s arrest in 1948. His guilt was, however, not proven. She graduated from phytopathology in 1956. Her thesis dealt with pathogenic strains of pathogens on seed potatoes. She worked at the Potato Research Institute until her testing in 1958, after which she returned to Prague. In the spring of 1959, she was admitted to the Department of Botany at the Faculty of Science of Charles University. She defended her dissertation on surface microflora on roots in 1965. With the incoming normalization at the faculty she did not pass the testing which made it difficult for her to find a job. It was not until 1972 that she was hired by the then Prague Centre for State Monument Protection and Nature Conservation, where she stayed until 1990. Jarmila Kubíková returned to the Faculty of Science in 1990 after political rehabilitation. Doc. RNDr. Jarmila Kubíková, CSc., made an outstanding contribution to nature conservation in Prague and the Central Bohemian Region. She introduced research as a natural part of the state nature conservation administration and was instrumental in the designation of dozens of protected areas. She is the author of numerous texts on mycology, rhizology, pedology, vegetation ecology and nature conservation in both books and journals, and she has also contributed to the Bohemia Centralis and Natura Pragensis journals both as an author and as an editor. In 2022 she lived in Prague.
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!
