Mgr. Iva Vojtková

* 1957

  • “When I see what filth people today are throwing at Havel, that’s outrageous. I’m not someone who adores him. But I’ve met him a couple of times and he was never a deranged drunk, he never acted like an idiot. He was a man with a charisma who achieved great things. And we need to respect him for that.”

  • “Václav Havel was an amazing person. Charismatic, intelligent, insightful. That man was capable of astonishing the world. Not many achieve that. And I think that a huge part of his success was Olga. She was this litmus paper who said this is not enough and this is too much… And he listened to her. The first time meeting them was in their flat in Prague, on the river bank, on his birthday, I don’t know how old he was back then. I came there and he says: “I’m Vašek, call me by my first name.” That was an experience. He was an icon for me. He was amazing. Everyone drank, danced, had both serious and silly discussions, it was a beautiful long evening. ”

  • “Svědectví was just transitioning to computers at the time. And Pavel Tigrid was left with a typing machine, Rank Xerox, with a floppy disc memory, this huge iron thing. He said he wanted to get it to Czechoslovakia but there was a problem with it. Usually the diplomats were used for smuggling. They would transport books, for instance, but nobody wanted to deal with this. So I said that I would take it myself. The option to store texts on a floppy disc and only print them out when necessary or when it was an appropriate time was a total revolution in our work. Zorka Růžová sewed this huge durable bag for the machine and I went home.”

  • “When we started publishing Voknoviny, we also had to pack it into envelopes and send it to people on our list. We did everything manually. The whole family would sit around the table and glue up envelopes. After the police raid the StB agents extracted saliva from them and analysed it. And during trial they stated that some belonged to a man with blood type A. They didn’t, however, find out who it was. It belonged to my son who was still in elementary school. So even these kinds of humorous situations happened sometimes.”

  • “I was summoned to Hradec for an interrogation. It was led by Major Kváš. That was exactly the kind of type that takes a train from eastern Slovakia with his feather blanket. Short, he looked like he was always dirty, in that suit made of tesil, smoking one Start cigarette after another. Just like in the 50s. Even the attitude, it was truly horrible. The worst were threats directed at children. He would tell me: “Well, you have two children. We know exactly which way they go to school. Do you think that if a car hits them that someone will investigate it? Is that what you want?””

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    Praha, 04.05.2016

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My mother told me: So what, in the worst case scenario they’ll lock you up. Others have made it, you’ll make it too

PN_Iva_Vojtkova_portret_dobovy.jpg (historic)
Mgr. Iva Vojtková
zdroj: Archiv Ivy Vojtkové, Jan Kotrbáček

Iva Vojtková, née Hejdová, was born in Česká Třebová on 2nd September 1957. Ever since she was a child she had to live with the stigma of a politically unreliable person‘s child - her father openly opposed the occupation of the country by the Warsaw Pact armies in August 1968. Instead of studying humanities she ended up temporarily as an electric locomotives maintenance worker. In the 1980s her need to act against the communist regime grew into distributing and later preparing the samizdat magazine Vokno and Voknoviny along with participating in other cultural activities of the underground movement with her partner and later husband František Stárek. By the end of the 1980s, the constant surveillance and minor bullying from the Stb resulted in a half-day house search, confiscation of a huge amount of property, an unscrupulous interrogation in Hradec Králové, including death threats to her two underage sons, and finally in June 1989 she was sentenced to one year in prison for indecency. She was soon freed from the grasp of communist oppression by the Velvet Revolution.