"I taught, and I must say, the professor was really very lucky because he told me straight away: 'You will not teach chemistry by lecturing, but it will be a so-called form of controlled reading.' Which really had an effect. Because the basics of chemistry they need they did in high school. So they should have studied it theoretically, then one of them said it. For example, what are basic hydrocarbons or what are the characteristics of alcohols, and how do they differ from phenols - and then we will practice. So I really have to say that the first students had good application opportunities after 1989. They were so experienced in chemistry because it was assumed that they would provide the theory for publications, a sort of brain. But they must be able to communicate with biologists, chemists, and doctors. Because we work for them."
"That was terrible. That was already JZD [agricultural cooperative], and they were guarding the water because there was no water. So we washed in the troughs like Fanfán Tulipán - one washes his feet, the other washes his face. And they shouted at us that we had to save water. I don't know if we showered in those three weeks. We lived above the pigs in a sty. We got a sack, stuffed it with hay, and slept on it. But the worst part was the food. That was terrible. In the morning, we got up at five o'clock in the winter. For breakfast, we had a slice of bread spread with jelly and a melta. I can't even smell melta since then, even though I know it's a healthy drink. And for lunch, they brought us soup and a stale roll to the hops. After that, I couldn't eat it at all. And for dinner, there were dumplings with some meat, which even the local dogs didn't eat afterward. It was awful. So for three whole weeks, we didn't have a piece of fruit, a piece of vegetable."
"She said: 'I was lucky that I only got the typhus at the end. Because one is terribly hungry.' And that [previously] she had scolded some young girl who got typhus and ate someone's bread. And that her aunt had terribly scolded her, that she shouldn't do that. And then she understood that she had an animal hunger and that she couldn't stand it."
Jana Zachová, née Kořínková, was born on 26 July 1939 in Prague‘s Kobylisy to Věra and Antonín Kořínek. She grew up in Košíře. During the war, her paternal aunt, Jarmila Kořínková, worked in the resistance organization Petition Committee We Will Stay (PVVZ). After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, she was detained by the Gestapo and transported to a concentration camp. She returned home in the fall of 1945. At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, Jana Zachová studied chemistry at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University. She devoted her entire professional life to science. In the 1960s, she worked at the Research Institute of Natural Medicines and the Research Institute of the Fat Industry, and from 1970 at the Institute of Physics of Charles University. In 1977, she defended the title of candidate of sciences (CSc.), writing a qualifying thesis on Growing and researching single crystals of nucleic acid base salts. Although she was active in the scientific and academic environment all her life, she never joined the Communist Party - but unlike her party colleagues, she could not travel to the West on business. In 2022, she lived in Prague and continued to work at the Institute of Physics of Charles University.
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