"I got my cadre papers from the personnel department, and we saw that the papers had already been gone through and there was nothing interesting, that they had disposed of it. I know that we even, I don't know if I was there with the students or alone, we just knew that the police were burning the documents here in Ochozí in the forest, so we went there to see the papers that they were burning, well, it was already burnt."
"The main problem we had was that we knew there should be a lot more people who didn't get in. At that time it was A, B, C, D, and whoever was the D didn't get in, whoever was some of the C's had problems, A, B, it sort of went. I was pretty busy every year with the entrance exams. It was a bit of a factor, but we didn't know the categorisation of these people beforehand. And when we knew it, it was helpful, but when we didn't know it, how, right. Well, it kind of bothered me, these sort of pre-determined conditions, whether somebody would be admitted to the faculty or not. That was wrong. And then we also used to say to students, for example, when we were throwing them out of the exam, that there might be somebody here instead who deserved it or who would be worthy of it, and not a jerk like him who didn't appreciate it and didn't study. So it was only the last consequences of this acceptance of non-acceptance."
"We lived on the ground floor and the family of a boy I was friends with lived above us. And his father was arrested by the Germans because he supposedly knew that there was going to be some new management of the Vítkovice Ironworks, I don't know if he really knew about it or not, and then some revolver was found wrapped in greasy paper in the garbage near our house. Who had put it there was somehow investigated, but never found out. Well, it wasn't a good time. And so I lost my friend, because of course they had to move out of the factory flat and a Gestapo man named Engel and his wife moved in. She didn't have any kids and she was having fun with me, but I was mad at her because of this friend. I had to say to her, 'Küss die Hand, gnädige Frau.' ('I kiss your hand, dear lady.') That was a common saying then, it was not unusual, but it bothered me, so I said to her, 'And anyway, it's better to be Czech than German!' Mummy squeezed my hand to keep quiet, but I just had to sort it out with her."
As a child I had no idea that even after the war we would live in such schizophrenia
Zdenka Rusínová, 80s
zdroj: Masaryk University Archives (available from: https://cestina.phil.muni.cz/studium/o-ucj/cesky-jazyk-a-literatura/rusinova-zdenka)
zdroj: Masaryk University Archives (available from: https://cestina.phil.muni.cz/studium/o-ucj/cesky-jazyk-a-literatura/rusinova-zdenka)
Stáhnout obrázek
Zdenka Rusínová, surname Zapletalová, was born on 13 June 1939 in Ostrava. Her father worked as a mechanical engineer in Vítkovice Ironworks, her mother was a teacher. At the end of the war, she lived with her younger sister at her grandparents‘ house in Chrudim due to the frequent bombing of Ostrava. After February 1948, they pressured her father to join the Communist Party. He successfully resisted, but the constant stress took a toll on his health and caused his early death. The witness graduated from high school and from 1956-1961 studied Czech-Russian at the Faculty of Philosophy in Brno. She then worked at her alma mater for her entire professional life, dealing mainly with morphology and word formation of the Czech language and teaching Czech to foreigners. During the normalisation period, she was in contact with people connected with dissent and helped to disseminate samizdat literature. In November and December 1989 she was active in the strike committee of the Brno Faculty of Philosophy and became one of the main faces of the Velvet Revolution in Brno. In her field of study, she gradually achieved habilitation and professorship, and in 1996-1999 she was the head of the Institute of Czech Language at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University. In 2024 Zdenka Rusínová, professor emeritus of Czech language, lived in Brno-Ivanovice.
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!
