Ing. Jiří Nor

„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.“

„After the war, I too felt the atmosphere of freedom, the enthusiasm of the nation that it was possible again to build and go foward now that the Nazi opression was gone. And I also remember how then, after the Communist coup in February 1948, the mood of the people and their optimism were gradually changing until eventually they succumbed to nihilism. The feelings of hopelessness didn´t arrive immediately. In 1948, 1949 people were saying „This is nonsense. This can´t last. It´ll collapse in 1950, it´ll collapse in ´52, then in ´53. It took some time before the nation got used to the fact that the dictatorship was here to stay. My father was in the Syndicate of Writers which was dissolved already in February. In his Memoirs, he describes the scene of the Presidium session as it was raided by a group calling itself Action Committee (Akční výbor) that demanded everybody to leave the room. Mr Drda, Mr Řezáč and I don´t recall the names of the others – they got a nickname the drdo-řezáč clique – they later dissolved the Syndicate of Czechoslovak Writers which had some 550 members and formed their own Union of Czechoslovak Writers wirh 123 members. That means that 75% of the writers were thrown overboard. My father was, naturally, among those. He was even more persecuted being at the time the Secretary of the Syndicate, in fact its Spokesperson. The President was, if I´m not mistaken, Karel Scheinpflug, that I knew from what my father told me and also later from his Memoirs. So, the period after the 1948 was, for many people the question of how to survive those few years until the inhuman regime collapses.