Ivana Šustrová

* 1948

  • "Amazing, the atmosphere was amazing, everything was very open, everybody was very friendly, whether you knew them or not, you got to know them very quickly. There was all sorts of singing going on in the evening, not the singers, they were allowed to sing as well, but just the guests in the bar, there was dancing as well and just amazing. It was just getting up in the morning, sitting in the bar for so long, it was so hard, but it was really good. There were just a lot of people who were not very young anymore, but still they were a lot of fun and it was very interesting what they were saying - where they were from, how long they had been in emigration and what they were doing and so on. That was a really great experience."

  • "And then suddenly one day you woke up and Prague was full of tanks, so it just made the decision faster. And we got a phone call from my mother's friends in West Berlin who had small children and with whom we had already arranged that they knew of such an organization, because they had au pairs for the small children, ladies for the children, so they would ask around, that I could somehow get a place there. That was in the springtime that it was discussed. They had been to Prague a few times to visit, too. And after the occupation, they called and said if I wanted to come right away, they would take me and I could be there right away. So that was a great offer, of course, so I left the Czech Republic on September 10th."

  • "Plus, I was actually too young to go out late at night. The cops didn't like to see that then, you had to have your ID on you at all times, and when the hunts for máničkas [of long-haired young men] started, it happened to me that I was walking down Vinohradská, then Stalinova Street, past Čechovy Sady, and a car pulled up behind me and the cops came out. And because I had jeans and long hair, they thought I was a boy. They immediately cut my hair, and when they found out I was a girl, they at least legitimized me, and then they left me alone. And things like that... so you just didn't wander around Prague alone as a girl too late."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 04.10.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:59:29
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 2

    Praha, 06.10.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:08:14
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I was so annoyed that we couldn‘t go to the West

Ivana Šustrová in 2022
Ivana Šustrová in 2022
zdroj: Post Bellum

Ivana Šustrová was born on 14 December 1948 in Prague to her mother Jitka Bodláková and father Josef Heller, but she did not grow up with him. She had an older sister Petruška, and after her mother‘s marriage they both took the name of her stepfather Vladimír Šustra. In 1957, her brother Martin was born, who tragically died in 1981. Ivana Šustrová dropped out of school at the age of twelve in 1967 and became a bus conductor. Shortly after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, she left for West Berlin via Switzerland, where she found work at the Telefunken factory. She then studied for three years at the Evangelical Academy and became a social worker. In Berlin she first met members of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (HRM), which her sister Petruška co-founded in Prague. In 1971 she worked briefly as a proofreader for the Czech-language far-left magazine Informační materiály (Infomat). After a break, she returned to Infomat and worked on the quarterly until 1981. In the 1980s, she established a friendship with Abbot Anastáz Opasek and the Opus Bonum association and participated in the organisation of meetings in Franken and concerts of Czech exile singers in Budapest. From 1985 she lived in Munich, from where she followed the events of the Velvet Revolution in Prague, but she did not return to her native country permanently. She was living in Berlin at the time of filming in 2022.