Mgr. Jiří Kučera

"The reason for the dismissal was the family's Christian faith, and my mother never wanted to give that up. The regime's struggle with the clergy was significant and strong... and there was nothing discrediting to find about my father. He didn't identify with the regime internally, but he didn't show it outwardly. I wasn't in his classes when he was teaching, but knowing him, he focused on his scholarly activities and shaping the personalities of his students. So the main reason for the dismissal was that our family went to church. Because in their opinion, he could not educate a young generation of the people's democratic state when being a Christian. Probably that was the reason why he was dismissed."

"I know that his dismissal caused quite a strong reaction at the grammar school. Partly from colleagues, but also from students. As far as I know from hearsay, they wrote a letter to the president of the republic saying that it was not right to dismiss a popular teacher for reasons that were not entirely clear. So they stood up for him. But then the people who signed that letter were questioned by the headmaster and maybe even by the party secretary. In the end they were persuaded not to send the letter, so it was quite dramatic. I think that Mr Sztacho, the headmaster at the time, played a very active role there. Basically, he went on to influence the lives of my siblings, but not only my siblings. A lot of people in Humpolec remember that time. And they remember how this man did harm."

"We were walking around the city and taking down the signboards of the Union of Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship, which we destroyed. Just some kind of defiance, resistance to it, because everyone felt that something was completely wrong. That was great. Then we went to Orlovská hájovna (gamekeeper´s cabin) with friends and we spent some time making plans to hurt the Russians. We composed the song and we were in a pub in Kejžlice, we drank a bit and we sang through the whole village: 'When Leon Brezhnev hangs on a branch ...' Stupidity of young boys, but we had them all, from Honecker to Ceausescu, and we sang all of them like this when we went up the village to the gamekeeper´s cabin. There were a lot of mushrooms there, so we ate mushrooms. It was a bit of a partisan game. Then the holidays were over, the school started ... we just said that no one in this state could say: Long live the Soviet Union! That can't happen anymore. It's just the end, to trust the Russians. Liberation, and then this came, it was a terrible shock. Then normalization began and somewhere on the radio from the exit from Kolbenka or somewhere it came again: 'Long live ...!' I got completely frozen. After all, we said that no one in that state could say that after what they had done to us. And again, there were people who began to support the regime."

"The fact is that my mother was a strong believer, she was a Catholic, and she led us to it from childhood. And that wasn't very common in the 1950s. Although my father was lukewarm in this direction, he did not go to church, my mother went, she was taking us with her. Then in those fifties one event took place, now I don't know if in the year 1956/1957, I was basically a little boy. Some quota arose on how many people needed to be removed from education or replaced by others. I know that here in Humpolec, I guess three people were chosen - my father, Mr. Muller, Mr. Šimbach. I have the impression that they taught at different types of schools. It was to be an exemplary warning that they were not behaving within what the current regime required, because going to church was a terrible evil. Although my father did not attend church and I think that, perhaps many witnesses could confirm that he was very popular among students as a professor. At that time, a wave arose against his dismissal. In the end, the students wanted to write to the presidency, then someone talked to them. The main figure of the whole problem was Mr. Josef Sztacho, who was the director of the grammar school, which was then connected with the primary school in Hradská Street."

"However, I believed that there was basically a better system because we knew nothing about democracy. Nobody told us anything like that since we were young, that there is such a thing at all, that there is a plurality of opinions, that there isn´t only one we have to blindly ... But we grew up in it from an early age, so we had no idea that there were other possibilities. The elders were supposed to work on it somehow, but I didn't even get it. So, I thought: Yeah, well, there will be socialism [with a human face] and it'll be better, culture will work. I did not realize that socialism with a human face is a chimera that is unfulfillable. Because either there is a plurality of opinions, and then, of course, there is democracy, not socialism, which played the leading role of the party. And one party cannot function in a pluralistic system. But at the time, it didn't bother anyone that such a thing could exist. "

"The moment that marked our family was the time of the 1950s, when it was really bitter and we all felt it was a terrible injustice to our father. He did not cope with it very well either. The family was suffering. As little children, we didn't feel it, that we would be hungry or anything, we were not. There was no luxury that we would buy bikes, skis and things like that, no, but otherwise I had quite a good childhood with a bunch of guys. When I was growing up, I had another experience with the army, which was interesting too. I started playing big beat, pretty long hair and stuff like that, and then there was a military draft and I was expelled at the military draft. I was soft, because if I had the sense I have today, I would have said, 'Do you want to take me away or not? You probably don't want to, give it to me written. That was the first moment that hit me quite hard with totalitarianism, as a boy I took it badly. I was eighteen and those were the years, the beautiful sixties and just the Beatles and the big beat, and now the soldiers came in and that was a terrible thing. I completely hated them because they humiliated me. They basically humiliated me when they sent me for a haircut, and I went to the military draft again the next day. That was one more contact with totalitarianism that I had a hard time bearing."