"At that time, there were four categories of teachers: those who remained loyal, as they used to say, that was [František] Lón and [Jaroslav] Zezula and a few others, and they formed the commissions that did the purges. Then they were all party members, almost all the people in the party were here at that time, only in the 60s a few non-party members got here, I among them, otherwise it was impossible before. Those partisans were divided into the expelled, who immediately got the fired from the jobs, and the excluded, who could maybe come back one day again, but they had to be good. Because if they had thrown those out too, there would have been no one left. The deserving ones would have stayed, they were almost on the fingers of one hand, and we non-partisans were few too. But at the time it seemed to me that we had quite advanced, that we were second rate. That there were the loyal ones, then it was us, then the struck out ones, and then the excluded ones at the end. But of course that was bullshit, nobody took us non-partisans seriously, like we didn't exist."
"I noticed right from the beginning that when I go for walks in the city I am not alone, that someone always accompanies me. For example, I went to the cinema and there you could sit in any seat, it wasn't numbered. So I sat down where there was nobody around, it didn't take a minute, and a person sat down with me. There was always an interval in the middle of the film so that people could go to the toilet or have a coffee, the whole cinema emptied out, everybody went to the buffet, except for us two, we stayed sitting there. I was counting two minutes, I took off and went to the buffet. And the guy took off after me. So funny things like that were going on. Or I'd go to a cafeteria to get a cup of coffee, and they hadn't even poured it yet, and a guy would come up behind me, stand in front of me, open a newspaper and read it. And you may not believe me, it's like a bad movie, but he had a hole in the newspaper and he was watching me through it. It's almost unbelievable, but it really happened. And the owner of the little bar, we were speaking Portuguese, but I knew he was Spanish because he had a Spanish accent, so I got into a conversation with him in Spanish and I said, 'Shit, I'm going to come in here sometimes and we're going to talk in Spanish so I don't forget.' But then I noticed the guy and the hole in there, so I never went in there again. I paid, went out the front and stood right next to the door, looked in the door, and ten seconds later his face appeared. That's the kind of thing that happened there."
"They put me in charge of making bulletin boards in the classroom back then. And I sighed at home in 1950 that it wasn't easy to keep coming up with themes. And my dad says, `I would know of one. Masaryk will have his centenary on March 7th. So it would be nice to make a bulletin board for that.' But that was in 1950. And I said, 'But I don't even have a picture of him.' He said, 'Well, I'll give you that.' And he got a nice big picture of Masaryk from somewhere. So I made a beautiful bulletin board, one of the best I've ever made, I think. When our class teacher saw it, she called me out into the hallway and squeezed my hand and told me that she thanked me very much for the bulletin board, but that I shouldn't have done it because it might get me in trouble. About two or three days later, the principal called me in. There was no mention of the bulletin board, but he asked what my mom was doing, where she went to work. I said she was taking care of my younger brother, that she was at home. He no doubt knew that, so he says, 'Well, if she's at home, she's got a lot of time, so tell her to come and speak on the school radio about the importance of collectivising our agriculture.' I was totally freaked out, I went home, I didn't know what to do, I said it at home and my dad again showed himself to be such a calming element, he always knew how to sort things like that out, so he says, 'You know what, you don't contact the headmaster and if he invites you and wants to know something, tell him I'll come and explain it to him. And you don't even talk to him about it.'"
Prof. Jiří Černý was born on 29 February 1936 in Hradec Králové. He remembers everyday life during the Nazi occupation and the dramatic end of the war, for example, he was an eyewitness to the mass escape of German civilians from the city. In 1947 he entered the gymnasium in Hradec Králové, but had to leave it after the first year due to Nejedlý’s school reform and could only finish it in the last three years (he graduated in 1954). From a young age he showed a talent for languages, and in 1955-1959 he studied Spanish-Russian at the then Pedagogical University in Olomouc. After graduation, he briefly taught Czech to foreign students at a course in Mariánské Lázně. In 1961-1962 he worked as an interpreter and translator in Cuba, where he met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in person. From 1963 he was employed as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Olomouc, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s he completed academic internships abroad in Portugal and Spain. During the period of normalisation, when he taught at the Department of Czech studies, he also completed several other internships, mainly in Poland. He was never a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and was restricted in his work during normalisation. After the Velvet Revolution, he became head of the Department of Romance Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Palacký University, where he was head for 20 years. In 2021 he lived in Olomouc and was still an emeritus professor at his home faculty.
