"We actually wanted the square to be named after him [Jan Palach] - where our school, the Faculty of Philosophy and the House of Artists are located. A funeral... no funeral is nice. But the knowledge that nothing will help... And when we went to school and on top of Letná street it said 'With the Soviet Union forever and never otherwise', it was like having a blanket thrown over your head. And now they're going to beat you, God knows who and God knows why. It's an incredible experience when you compare it to the freedom of movement, I'm not talking about what's happening in the world now, I'm talking about the fact that we still have the opportunity to travel, we still have the opportunity to live some of our dreams as we imagine. Not everyone always gets to do everything, I've always been able to deal with that in my life, maybe because of my upbringing at home. But we should just value freedom of speech tremendously, we should value that one shouldn't hurt anyone. And the basis of human value is love, not only for yourself, for everyone around you, but also for the place where you grow up."
"So on the morning of the twenty-first, our [supervisor] who was in charge of us came there and threw this newspaper in front of me and there was a bus on fire. It was pictures of the BBC and she said, "There's a war on your side, you can't go back." Well, at that point all connection with the Republic ended. So we watched the BBC to see what was going on. The BBC, of course, was covering everything, the worst of it, that is, where who shot who, where something was burning, where just... It was a shock to the whole world, but for us it was a terrible shock. But they immediately offered us, whoever wanted to - it wasn't immediately, it was, let's say, a week or so - whoever wanted to, that they could continue to study there if they could somehow manage to do it, at least partially. To start, for example, to study English in a hurry, but to make arrangements and to be able to stay there at all. Imagine you are not very old, suddenly you are in the world, suddenly you know... So I feel very much for Ukraine, I know what it is - suddenly, out of the blue, when this is happening and you don't know when what is going to happen next."
"It's just that our industry was driven, even if it didn't seem like it, it was driven by the artists. Because we may have been a socialist republic, but we had to sell to the West. And the light industry fed the heavy industry at that time. So the goods had to be competitive on a global scale. So I suddenly became more interested in fashion, art, in the sense that I went on business trips then, even though I was never in the Communist Party, I went to the West twice a year, I went to Paris and I went to Florence. Florence is the cradle of men's fashion, Paris is women's fashion. I was working in the UBOK [Institute of Housing and Clothing Culture] in the cotton sector, so I went all over the country, therefore also in Slovakia, to cotton companies where they were designing, and we were selecting the different collections for the next six months, but we only had an advisory vote. That is, when there was a deal with a customer from the West, we were there at the meeting. The negotiation was conducted by Centrotex, who were the sellers, or the dealers, and we were there as expert advisors as to whether it could be made the way the customer wanted it, or whether certain adjustments had to be made, because not every machine can do what you imagine."
Růžena Šromová, née Veselá, was born on 20 August 1944 in Příbram as the youngest of three children. Her father Matouš fought in the First World War in Italy, where he was wounded. The family owned a gardening and flower shop in Příbram. After the communists came to power, the gardening business was confiscated and the shop was nationalized. Although she graduated from primary school with honours, as the daughter of a tradesman she was not allowed to study, and for two years she was apprenticed at the Texlen factory in Adršpach. This was followed by four years of study at the Secondary School of Linen in Jilemnice. From an early age she was interested in art and in Jilemnice she started attending an art club, where, in addition to drawing, she got into weaving tapestries. After graduating from high school, she applied to the University of Applied Arts in Prague, where she passed the sieve of 300 applicants. In the summer of 1968 she went to England and Sweden for a study stay, where she was caught by the news of the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops. Although she had the opportunity to stay in England and finish her university studies there, she returned home in September of that year. After her studies she married and had two daughters. She worked at the Institute of Furnishing and Clothing Culture in Prague, where she had the opportunity to travel twice a year to the West, to Florence and Paris, to select new collections. She never joined the Communist Party despite the insistence of the leadership. In the second half of the 1970s, she moved with her husband to Kunvald, where he was given a position as an agricultural engineer. After her maternity leave, she started working in Tepná Náchod, where she and her colleagues went on a protest march against the regime in November 1989. After the Velvet Revolution, she worked in the Mileta company in Hořice and devoted herself to her own artistic work. After 2000 she had several solo exhibitions of paintings and tapestries. In 2023 she lived in her native house in Příbram.
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!
