MUDr. Anna Dusová

* 1942

  • "Well, I can't say they weren't polite or so, but they just tried to somehow make me believe that I was a collaborator and that my husband had collaborated with foreign countries and things like that, which was not true at all. But since they found and took all that stuff from him, including his letters with his foreign friends, it was like he had contact with foreign countries because they would visit us too, while it was possible and also afterwards. In the end, we sort of stood our ground, they didn't hear anything special from us. They mainly wanted to know any connection with he would socialise with, who he visited, just everything. I think the worst part was they also questioned people from my husband's evangelical community. These old ladies who were actually freaked out and had nothing to do with it at all. And they actually scared everybody, it was pretty harsh."

  • "My daughter was born in April, so I gave birth in the middle of the euphoria and all that. Like, we were so excited. I was actually finishing up college, so I was imagining what everything was going to be like and how wonderful it was all going to be. And my husband was in Cambridge, England for two semesters, so we were thinking the world was going to be open and it was all going to be wonderful. My husband came back, he wasn't even at my graduation because he didn't come back until afterwards, and he was like, 'Everybody abroad says we're going to be occupied, they're standing on the border and that they're definitely...' We didn't believe any of that. We would say, 'They're not going to do that in front of the whole world, to fail like that. I mean, the whole world knows what it's about in our country and that it's all right. It's not happening and it's not possible, it's not going to happen.' Yeah. That was in July."

  • "Well my earliest memories are of us going to the shelter. It was in the house, there was a shelter made in the basement. It was one room where there were like benches around the wall. That's where we used to gather from all over the house. That's what I remember because then one time a bomb hit our chimney in '45 and it spilled into the basement shelter, so we were all awfully dirty."

  • "Petr was just over a year old and Hana was three years old. It was tough. If you think about it, it was rubbish. If you saw the leaflet, it actually just said that they didn't have to (go vote), so that people wouldn't worry, they didn't have to go to the polls or agree with everything, but they took it as preparation for subversion, so he got fifteen months."

  • "My son was in tech school and involved in the revolution, so we were terrified of that. We were scared because we had seen 1968, so we were afraid it was going to be the same again. See, we woke up back then and we couldn't believe at all that the Russians would do that in front of the whole world, that they would discredit themselves like that. We actually heard the planes flying at night and tanks and all that in the morning. It was a terrible shock to us. That was the year my daughter was born in '68. That was the fear in us, and when the boy didn't come home for two days, we were mortified. They were all in the lecture rooms in schools and were being educated, being told how everything was. So, they didn't have the fear in them, and my son said, 'Please, don't worry Mum, it's fine, it's fine.'"

  • "In fact, I was meant to be born in June, but there were house searches. There was always an SS man and a Czech policeman going through all the flats, and my mother got upset because they just searched everywhere, looking under the beds and just everywhere, so I was actually born a fortnight early."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 16.11.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 01:31:30
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Praha, 08.03.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 01:53:05
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

They were trying to make things difficult for people

Anna Dusová in 1973
Anna Dusová in 1973
photo: Witness's archive

Anna Dusová, née Doležalová, was born in Prague on 31 May 1942 into an evangelical family. She never stopped going to church even in the 1950s. Later in her teens she took part in youth retreats organised by the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren. When she was not admitted to a high school of economics, she got a nurse training. After two years of working in a hospital, she applied to study at a medical faculty on recommendation and graduated in 1968. She married Jaromír Dus, an evangelical pastor in Prague-Vršovice. Her husband was arrested by the StB in 1971 for distributing anti-election leaflets. His permission to work as a clergyman was revoked and he spent a total of fifteen months in prison. That was when Anna Dusová was on duty in hospital, finishing her certification and taking care of two young children. She was a general practitioner in Prague 8 from 1977. In 2024, she lived with her husband in Prague and still partially attended her practice.