Ing. Jiří Nor

„It was my pleasure to take the maturita exams in Maths, Physics and Czech. I was good at all these subjects but was taken by surprise by the Russian question. I drew as the topic the book Mladá garda – Molodaja gvardija. This book was on the list of compulsory reading. I had gone through all the grades – The Badge of Fučík (named after the Czech writer, the victim of the Nazi terror, and a national hero of the time – note of MČ), etc. without ever having this book in my hands. And now I was given a short piece of the text and was asked to speak about the book. I was saved by the Russian secondary school (where I had studied earlier) as I was able to speak in fluent Russian about absolutely nothing, which kept other members of the examining jury in a kind of semi-asleep state. The Russian teacher, I have to say, co-operated. She understood that I didn´t know anything about the subject.The only name I remembered, and still remember today, was Oleg Koshevoj so I said „vychodil odin malčik“ and kept speaking. After a few minutes of this blubbering nonsense, she looked at the jury and said „This is great. Very good.“ This was how I passed my maturita exam with a top mark also in Russian.“

„Later I built models of ships and became crazy about flying. That attraction lasted, so that when the time came to decide about the university studies, I, of course, wanted to study flying. Well, that was out of question in the communist Czechoslovakia, it could only be studied at the Military Academy in Brno.I wouldn´t qualify there politically and also had no interest in such an institution so I chose something that was the closest and that was the Faculty of Engineering the advantage of which was that there were fewer applicants than they wanted to accept and there was some hope that my acceptance would pass without problems. That is what I thought. I took the written entrance exams and in a month received the official letter that I was conditionally admitted. „OK, fine, I´m going on holidays.“ But my father smelled the rat in the word „conditionally“so started to run around and found out that in fact I was not accepted. The reason was that out of, I think, 13 references that were part of my file, one was negative. My father thought that he had dealt with all the pertinent organizations, his employer and the Communist Party organization in the place of emloyment and in the place of residence and the Trade Union and God knows what else. He managed 12 of them but the 13th that was negative came from the “street committee“ where we lived. And this was enough to destroy everything. But father wasn´t going to give up. He tried everything here and there, went to speak to the personnel officer, a person who it was not possible to communicate with at all, etc., etc. He finally approached the Rector of the Technical University Prof. Ježdík whom he had known since his student´s times at the “kolonka“ in Letná. He explained the case to him. Prof. Ježdík got somewhat angry: “Well,this is impossible, I have to accept students with average marks and here I have a student with top marks and they will not allow me to accept him!“ So in the end, the Rector managed somehow to persude even the personnel officer and I was accepted without condition.“