"I also asked my father once when I was already married and we learned about the mock trials (of the 1950s). 'You really didn´t find it strange - all that was going on? That it wasn't strange to me - so what, I was a little girl, but you're such an old seasoned guy and a party member?' And he said, 'You know, in a way I didn´t.' Because he had a party job in the place of residence, in the street organization. And he said that coincidentally there had been some kind of fraud of contribution stamps or something like that at the district level. And the name of Reicin was somehow involved in it, or I don't know who it was. 'And it seemed to me that they must have found out something in the end, I thought it might be true.' He didn't see into it that much, he just had these indirect hints that there might be some truth in it. He didn't start opening his eyes until sometime in the '60s."
"When [my husband] came home from work one day saying 'I'm going to Colombia', I was so excited. Understandably, who would be reluctant to travel to the world? Apart from Bulgaria, there was nowhere else to go from our country. And we didn't even have the money to go to the seaside. Well, that was something. I needed to finish my studies, and we were to leave at the end of the summer. Only that it also meant that I started going to Zamini (abbreviation for Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ed.) for training for wives. There was a full class of us wives sitting there, who were about to go off in all directions to the world. And now they had to cram a lot of knowledge into us: about dressing, around dining, and I don't know what else. Meanwhile, I was doing state exams and taking care of the baby and seeing the doctors because we had to be healthy and have fixed teeth and things like that. We got some financial allowance to buy clothes so we would look appropriately. Well, in August we flew."
"Because in that institute you had a bunch of mostly younger people who in ordinary conversation expressed opinions in accordance with the [reformist] direction of the 1968 (Prague Spring, ed.). These people had information and had insight into a lot of things. They weren't so fooled by some Red Right (party daily, trans.) statistics, they saw into it in detail. And they were critical. We were more or less close enough in age, so there was a kind of a nice bunch. And there was a growing feeling among us that we needed to reform the party somehow, to do something about it, it couldn't go on that way. And I saw in them the potential of people who might be able to do it, or take care of it, advocate for it. So more or less [I decided] under their influence."
"Apart from the fact that we had quality food, we had advantages that nobody else had. We didn't know there was the war, so to speak. Because we had flour from farmers. The farmers, according to some obligations and according to the acreage, the number of cattle and hens, they had a certain quota of what they had to directly pay in kind. What they had left over they could use themselves. So, they were entitled to have their own flour delivered to a bakery, and to have bread baked from good quality flour. Because the bread which was on rations was actually inedible. It was such a nasty muck, it was ususally cut for the ducks. So we had self-suppliers´ bread, we had milk from the farm, we had our own chickens, rabbits - all that stuff. Relatives from Hradec [Králové] and [Česká] Třebová would come to us for food supplies."
Darja Vágnerová was born on 12 November 1933 to Maria and Zdeněk Hyský in Prague. The family moved frequently during Darja‘s childhood, and they spent the Second World War in the Orlické Mountains in the village of Javornice. The witness recalls that thanks to the help of neighbours and family´s own sources of food, she hardly perceived the war. After the war, her father was living in euphoria, and being a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, he immediately presented himself in Prague with the vision of building the republic. The family subsequently moved to Děčín, where he got a job as a sawmill manager. In 1952, already in Prague, Darja graduated from secondary school and with her clean cadre profile she was able to begin her studies at the University of Economics. In 1954, she married Zdeněk Vágner, whom she had met at the university, and their daughter Dita was born. Soon after graduating from university, her husband got a job at the consulate in Bogotá, Colombia, where the family moved in 1957, just after Darja‘s final exams. The family increased in number in Colombia when a son Martin was born. After returning to Prague in 1961, Darja Vágnerová began working at the Research Institute of National Economic Planning. In 1965, she entered the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia expecting to join the reformists, and she signed Two Thousand Words. After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, she was expelled from the party and lost her job. She found a new job at a research institute dealing with transport equipment and lived with the stained cadre profile until 1989. In 2022, she was living in Prague.
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!
