Kristina Černá

“We arrived; it was my first experience with capitalism, more likely with capitalistic country abroad. I was 10 or 9 years old, and now, when I arrived to Vienna and there was uncle Karel (Krautgartner), who was excellent musician, leader of jazz orchestra and I don’t know what else. I perceived him mainly as an uncle, a great one, who loved children and ice cream. I loved ice cream too. And the capitalism seemed for me unbelievably great, perfect, because he…as adult people…those times were exciting, all the people were discussing and so on...They had a dog, and with that dog, they went for a walk at midnight… and at the midnight in Vienna there was a place called ice-salon, it was a shop with ice cream and there at the midnight they had 20 flavours of ice cream, which they were selling. I had totally bulged eyes and Karel was telling me : »Come on lets have one, won’t we«“

“So I finally graduated the university, and when I did that, I went to work at psychiatric hospital in Kroměříž at a post of clinical psychologist. I worked there for two years, but I had to leave because they didn’t extend my contract and there was an incident, when the director of this hospital tried to beguile me into KSČ, and I refused to. He said to me: »Don’t refuse it so fast, think about it. You know, if you were in KSČ, there might be a chance to do something about that contract.«I got angry and I went to the director, who was in charge of the entire hospital. So I made a lot of complaints and I told him, about the extortion from the director of psychiatric hospital. It was like he turned to stone. "How do you think that?" he asked me. So I explained it all and he knitted his brows. So, it was a big mess around all the hospital, but I left through the centre. I had to leave, but the director of the psychiatric department got a bad reputation from party groups, “Not this way Comrade. We can’t motivate young this way” My colleagues liked me for that, because he was attracting all the young psychologists and psychiatrics that way.”

"However, I was employed, and those were wild years, 1996/7. Everything went wrong because the politics reflected into private lives. My husband and I were employed at a private school, where they were very content with us, and we were able to establish an annual program for the students of psychology. were having lots of fun, it was nice and the students were excited about it. About halfway through the school year, when I was pregnant, the manager owner of the school stopped paying salaries. He took from the school fund that was supposed to be for students, he didn't pay rent, and he took grants from the state and didn't pay anything to anybody. We were fortunately outside workers, but for those regular, he did not pay social and medical insurance for years. So they had huge debts and they didn’t know about them. There was nothing else we could do; we had to submit a collective action against him. We were so idealistic in it that we carried on with lecturing for free, at the end he owed us 100 thousands crowns, it was a lot of money in that times. I was close to childbirth. Nothing at all; that money was lost, squandered, even though it was money from the state, and we never saw them again. They jailed him for a while, but soon they freed him from pre-trial detention. He was a man who acted on Ministry of Education, worked in legislative; he was educated in law through founding those private schools so he knew exactly that he was imperceptible. That time, this stealing, refusing to pay taxes, social insurance etc., it was all legal, that time. That time, people made up lots of debts which they didn’t pay for, they weren’t persecuted for that, there were no executors. So he founded few more of these schools and he siphoned off funds them all off."