“We were just that day in Slovakia visiting family in Vysoká nad Kysucou, and my father's sister, the lady I was talking about, who also inspired Jaroslav Pospíšil, never let herself be fooled by what the comrades were saying, she always knew her stuff. We were visiting them, we got up and my aunt said: ‘I was listening to the radio and thought that it was a strange stupid play. And then I found out that the Russian troops were truly invading Prague.‘ And all of us were terrified because our grandma lived in Zlín and she was really old and we were afraid of how she could manage if necessary, so we immediately dressed up, prepared and went back to Zlín and we were already meeting cars, we arrived in Zlín, our grandmother luckily did not know anything and we had been processing the situation, we did not want to believe that it was even possible.”
“I was surprised when we had an external teacher in our first or second year of (secondary) school who opened space for our fantasy and for going back to the past but also thinking about the present because he taught us Civil Engineering and we somehow touched the topic of brickyards and he told us: ‘The comrades decided that there would be no small brickyards and there would be big brick factories. And that is why they took the first step, they shut down all the small manufacturing plants and they did not manage to take the second step which was to build the new ones and that's why it looks the way it does here.’ And so also the last ones who were lax, who were not committed but also those normal people who were going through life, they've come to understand that it was all kind of weird."
“We were not affected at all by our parents, we would, of course, hear words like ‘revanchists‘ but it is true that when I thought about it retrospectively, I realized that our class teacher tried to educate us in the spirit of the then time. She of course tried to treat us in a way that was convenient with the regime and I know that it got to the point that she started to pick on a schoolmate whose parents were deeply religious and went to church. She was standing in the classroom, she summoned her in front of the teacher´s desk and said: ‘Jiřinka, there is no God. What do you say?‘ Jiřinka was quiet. The class was looking at the teacher when the teacher told us: ‘Children, laugh, ha-ha-ha, so they were laughing because they were little, stupid and did not know. But Jiřka did not give up, she graduated from the secondary technical school with me.”
Jarmila Trávníčková, née Vranečková was born on 25 June 1949 in Gottwaldov. Her father Josef joined partisans at the end of World War II and later arrived in Zlín together with the Red Army and he got married to Jarmila´s mum there. Jarmila went to school in the 1950s that were highly affected by the Stalinist Era during which for example the teacher bullied their religious schoolmate in front of the whole class. She started to study at Secondary Technical School in Gottwaldov, majoring in construction. When she was seventeen years old and had her dancing lessons dress sewed, she was asked whether she wanted to be a model. Jarmila then modelled at the big fashion shows that took place only in Prague and Gottwaldov in the second half of the 1960s. In 1971, she got married to Jan Trávníček, a guitar player and a singer of the Ozvěny band, which operated under the management of the monopolistic art agency Pragokoncert. It bullied its charges rather than helping them in any way. The musicians had to pay Pragokoncert in foreign currency for going abroad and bring back expensive bribes from their travels to be able to go abroad again next time. Her husband´s foreign travels often meant six months apart from him for Jarmila and their daughter Daniela. Some fellow citizens did not like the family. They envied Jarmila for her husband who went to the West and also for the fact that she worked as a model for the Centroprojekt company. Jarmila Trávníčková started to work as an editor in a regional newspaper after the fall of the Communist regime and she became a spokeswoman for the Zlín Municipal Theatre in 2001. She and her husband Jan were living in Zlín in 2021.
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!
