"I had just been called in for questioning, I must have been in about my third year, so it was something like 1980 [1980]. It was, as it turned out, after an apartment seminary with Peter Krejci and his wife in South Town. There was somebody there who apparently denounced. Even then my mother knew who it was, but I don't remember. After about a year, I was called to Bartolomejska for questioning. My mother went with me and waited in a café in Maja. I still didn't know what they were asking, because they said I had to know what I had done wrong. I had no idea what they were asking, and then it came out what I had done on December 13. I know it's my birthday, but what I did, I really don't know. And I didn't know. We gradually figured out that it was going to be this housing seminar. They tried to tell me that they were making some anti-state posters and so on. I said, 'No, it's a seminar.' Then they started asking me about different people. And because the lieutenant was dating awfully slow, I always read the question. I had learned this paragraph that I wouldn't testify because it would endanger a loved one. So I used that, whereupon the lieutenant got very upset that I wasn't a lawyer and didn't know what a loved one was. I said, 'I may not be a lawyer, but I would feel the harm.' So we always said, 'I refuse to answer, I refuse to answer.' I knew I had to go on duty at night, I knew I had to go to the hospital because I was on duty. I needed to go to the bathroom, so they took me there. When I was coming back, they told me to wait. Then apparently someone higher up read it and I guess they figured they weren't going to get anything out of me, so then they moved quickly towards the end."
"When I went to school in Prague, I had some letters in envelopes in my bag to drop off at the post office, and my brother had something to drop off. Sometime at six o'clock in the morning, I don't know what time it was, we hadn't gotten up yet, so the bell rang and a State Security officer from the district came in and said that they were coming from Prague and that there was going to be a search. We were kind enough to let him in, there was a big hall, the rooms were coming out of the hall, so we let him sit in the hall. I knew I had to get rid of the letters. There was a toilet next to my room. The apartment was originally built into the attic. Part of the attic was left, that corner of the attic belonged to the Dus, that was the Dus attic. We had a window leading from the toilet. So I flushed some of the letters down the toilet, and some of them I threw in the attic. We had the same kind of attic next to the hall, and that's where we threw all the garbage. There was this huge pile of papers. Then when the search came, they looked through all the books, they emptied them, they took everything from me - even some tapes from the wedding that I had recorded, and they claimed that Karásek was there, but he wasn't really there, because they played some of the photos and so on in front of me. The only thing that saved us was the terrible mess in the attic, because when they opened the door and saw the pile of garbage, they closed it and didn't search the attic. There was a lot hidden there."
"When I was a child, there were several camps. One was in Strmilov, where the parish priest Balabán was. The Strmilov one is near Jindřichův Hradec."
- "Yes, between Telč and Jindřichův Hradec." -
"So we were there for one year and then we were probably two or three times at Mířkov, that was somewhere near Horšovský Týn. There was also a pond there. That's when the Hejdáneks came to us during the holidays with their four daughters. And then there were the Kocabs and the Sims, Balabán's children. So that's what stuck with me from my childhood, these joint camps. That was pre-school age and the beginning of school age. I miss those friends today. I was really used to our doors not being broken down. There were always interesting conversations about the meaning of life, the role of the church in society, and ultimately those social issues, and what is the duty of a Christian and how he should behave in this world. I lived that a lot."
Blanka Zlatohlávková, née Trojanová, was born on 13 December 1954 in Prague. Both her parents, her father Jakub Schwarz Trojan and later her mother Karla Trojanová, née Schwarz, were evangelical ministers. From 1956 to 1966, Blanka Zlatohlávková lived with her parents and younger brother Pavel in Kdyně near Domažlice, where her father was the pastor of the local church. Even then, she was influenced by the debates between her father and his close friends, such as his high school classmate, the philosopher Ladislav Hejdánek, and the parish priest Alfréd Kocáb. Both of them were involved, together with Jakub S. Trojan, in the informal association Nová orientace (New Orientation) and were frequent visitors to Kdyně. In December 1966, the Trojans moved to the Central Bohemian village of Libiš near Neratovice. There they also lived through the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops. In January 1969, her father buried Jan Palach, which later had consequences for the whole family. In 1974, the communist authorities withdrew Jakub S. Trojan‘s state permission to exercise clerical activities. Neither Blanka Zlatohlávková nor her brother could study at university. She spent a year as an orderly in a hospital in Krk. After that she entered the secondary medical school. She tried repeatedly to apply for medical school, but to no avail. In February 1976, she married Martin Zlatohlávek. In 1977, her father signed Charter 77. Paradoxically, this enabled her to start studying at the 2nd Faculty of Medicine of Charles University the same year. She and her husband often attended various housing seminars. She was interrogated by the State Security Service in 1980 for her participation in one of them. After graduation in 1983, she started working in paediatrics at the Klaudián Hospital in Mladá Boleslav. In 1985, her daughter Eliška was born. After her maternity leave, she started working in the neonatology department at the Gynaecology and Obstetrics Clinic of the 1st Medical Faculty of Charles University and the General University Hospital in Prague. She participated in the student demonstration on 17 November 1989, which started the regime change. After the Velvet Revolution, she continued her work as a neonatologist and became an expert in her field. In 2022 she lived 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!
