“I was a dangerous person. Although the boss, the director there was my former school mate. He had studied a so-called ADK – they were originally workers, who passed some simplified graduation exam from secondary school, and thus they were able to get admitted to university – and he was a dyed-in-the-wool communist, and I was a great enemy of this country. He thus made problems to me on purpose, like that he would sign a permission to take holidays for everybody except me and leave me there to do everything, including even things that were not in my job description, and I did not have any facility to place my children to, because it was in summer, the children were little and the kindergarten was closed, and so was school... I absolutely did not know what to do with them. I had no way to solve it. My husband did not have a holiday, either... They placed a guy into my office, who was in charge of repairing buses. He was sitting there with me all day and only listening to my telephone calls. I only had work-related phone calls, nothing else at all. And he would always place the newspaper or whatever he was reading aside, and listen with whom and about what I was talking. He could not absolutely understand the content anyway, I talked in scientific terms. They fired another woman, and I had had access to secret maps before, and they cancelled my access immediately.”
“Trains were constantly not running, because there were air raids almost every day, but my father who was a teacher, believed that it was not possible that I would not have education and miss school which was far away, and thus I had to go there. But I thought to myself that I would make the walk shorter, why take a detour, and so I would simply walk straight there. I always had quite a good sense of orientation even since I was a little girl, and so I headed in the straight directions. Girls stayed in Bohuslavice and I started walking alone on a path between fields. It was already in the middle of April 1945 and suddenly a German solder, a young boy, was standing in front of me. I remember that he was really a youngster. He shouted at me: ‘Halt! Wohin gehst du?’ He asked where I was going. I said that I was on my way from school and that I was walking home. He looked around to see if there was somebody there but he didn’t see anybody and he slapped me on my face really hard and he told me in German: ‘If you ever say to anyone that you saw me here, I will shoot you and I will shoot all of you.’ And he told me to go away. I was crying. I reached home and I have really never said about this to anyone in my life; actually I only said it to my grandchildren.”
“Well, we experienced a lot, because in 1967 there was the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab nations. What they did was that they deported children and women away, and men stayed there. I thus left with the children and I didn’t know anything about my husband at all. I left by plane with our children: Petr was two and a half years old and Honza was eleven. We were at an airport in Syria. Little Petr got some dysentery or salmonella, and so it was terrible. We transferred to another airplane in Syria and I had no more clothes for him, because he had diarrhoea all the time… I returned with the children, and two hours later they bombed out the airport. My older son declared that they had to bomb it out, because his little brother had shitted the place all over. We didn’t know about my husband, we only heard from him later. It was at the beginning of June and he was able to get here only in August. His journey was complicated, they went by cars somehow, but it was dangerous and he also contracted a serious case of pneumonia due to the travel on those roads. In September we went to Iraq again, to a different house.”
The human race is incorrigible, but life is worth it
RNDr. Marie Chaloupská, roz. Kašparová
photo: archiv pamětnice, současné foto pořízené Marií Mrvovou
photo: archiv pamětnice, současné foto pořízené Marií Mrvovou
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Marie Chaloupská, née Kašparová, was born November 12, 1933 in Horní Věžnice near Polná. When she was one year old, her family moved to Slavětín near Nové Město nad Metují and Marie attended the local school there during WWII. She met German soldiers as well as Russian partisans. Marie graduated in 1952. She wished to study philosophy or literature, but since she did not have a politically favourable family origin, she went to study geology instead, majoring in hydrogeology and engineering geology. While studying at the faculty, she met her future husband Josef Chaloupský, who studied geology as well, but focusing on a different field - basic research - and he also did scientific work. They married in 1956. Marie then worked in construction geology in Prague until her first son Jan was born. Jan is a civil engineer as well and he lives in Trutnov. Eight years later their second son Petr was born. He is also an engineer, and at the same time he serves as an organist and a choir conductor in the church of St. Giles in Prague. Marie Chaloupská subsequently worked in Geofond, the central geological archive, and at the same time she was taking care of the children and household. The couple travelled frequently. In 1966-1968, RNDr. Josef Chaloupský lectured at the branch campus of the University of Baghdad in Mosul in Iraq where they lived with their children for two years. Marie experienced the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War while there. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, her husband was helping foreign participants of the international geological congress to cross the border. Mr. and Mrs. Chaloupský publicly criticized the occupation and they both faced dismissal from their jobs. Josef then went to work to Libya for one year, while Marie took care of the household and in the evenings she worked on her doctoral degree. In 1970 Josef received a scholarship to go to Norway for one year, and he continued with his research there. Marie with both their sons joined him there for four months. Then they went to Cuba for one year, while the older son remained at home, because he was preparing for the final examination in his last year of secondary school. After a difficult period of working in the archive, Marie wanted to go to work in a dairy shop, because with her personal-political profile she was unable to find another job, but eventually she found employment as a geologist during the construction of the Prague metro. She worked there for twenty-five years and she went down to the tunnels every day. Her colleagues started calling her “The First Lady of Czech Geology.” While working there, she met several well-known persons: Václav Malý, who was cleaning toilets and showers there, or Jiří Dienstbier, who worked in a boiler room. She has never become a member of the Communist Party.
Wedding of Marie Hojná and Bohumír Kašpar in Černilov in 1927. On the right bridesmaid Marie Hojná, young boy Václav Rejchrt, on the left bridesmaid Dohalsky and young boy Rudolf Kašpar, brother of the groom
Wedding of Marie Hojná and Bohumír Kašpar in Černilov in 1927. On the right bridesmaid Marie Hojná, young boy Václav Rejchrt, on the left bridesmaid Dohalsky and young boy Rudolf Kašpar, brother of the groom
