"There were more undercover agents than actual exhibit visitors. During the opening, Tomáš Ruller got onstage with such a performance that was obviously a frontal attack at the government of the time. And since there were journalists present, they wrote an article and we were told to shut down the exhibition the next day. Many prominent artists from Louny and art school professors intervened. They said it would look bad if it closed, so the exhibition was left alone. When we finished, investigation ensued. The chairman of the local national committee Rušar took the brunt of it, being dragged through interrogations again and again. The same goes for Věra Vopatová, the head of the community centre. Most of all, they accused Tomáš Ruller, who was on trial in Louny and was to be sentenced for the defamation of the state system and the Communist Party. Igor Zhoř came from Brno and defended him by pointing out that there were art groups and activities all over the world including in Russia that were not clear-cut, in that artists would get various ideas and just follow them and do it... He managed somehow, I don't know how, we weren't allowed in, but he managed to defend Tomáš Ruller and nothing came of it."
"We were enthusiastic and my husband and I joined the Communist Party in 1967. They kicked my husband out just a year later, and wanted to kick me out too. At the time, I was working at the Julius Fučík Mine in Bílina. The local chairman of the CPC said they couldn't kick me out because my father had been in a concentration camp. So they didn't fire me and I figured I would have to stay so that my girls could get good education, which they did. My elder daughter is a pediatrician and my other daughter Jitka is a teacher. I couldn't mess with politics much at that time and didn't have time to stay for meetings. I had to go home to my children, I commuted between Bílina and Most." - "What made you decide to join the party?" - "It was the enthusiasm prevailing at the time. No one can remember much of it now, but the Prague Spring excited a lot of people at the time. We all thought it would be like the West, that we would live like they did, that things would change and it would be good."
"When the Russians arrived in Lom, they stopped on the main road. There was a long line of tanks and the Russian soldiers ran to the apartments where German women lived and raped them. Typical. Some Czechs even showed them around and pointed them to where the Germans lived. My mother was German and she looked out the window and saw them pointing to our house. Since my mother was strongly religious, she rushed to the image of the Virgin Mary and begged for help. She then said the picture told her to tell them that her son was a Bolshevik and her husband was imprisoned in the Terezin concentration camp. She didn't speak Czech, so she sort of blurted it out in German when they came. They smiled, grabbed me and left. She flew after me and after them. They carried me up to those rows of tanks, handed me to one of the soldiers and he gave me a big slice of bread smeared with jam, put me back on the sidewalk and my mother came and picked me up and we ran home. This is what I remember from 1945 when Russians rolled into Bohemia."
"The real pretext for my father's arrest was likely that the Gestapo had caught a group of communists and found out his daughter was in that group. Maybe he was influenced by her communist views, maybe he said something to his fellow miners that was divulged and that was probably the real reason. I can't imagine he would have been arrested for bread. He was in Terezín from 1942, then they moved him to Pirna where he dug a factory in the rock. He was in a prisoner of war camp there towards the end of the war. When the Russians came to Bohemia via the Erzgebirge, he escaped from the camp and wandered through the mountains for a week, hiding from German farms. The Banderites had their bases there. He zigzagged between all that and only after a week did he get home to Lom. He was starving and sick, he had silicosis."
Kristina Folprechtová, née Scheinpflug, was born in Lom near Most on 14 October 1940 into a German family. Her father, Oswald Scheinpflug, was imprisoned by the Nazis for political reasons, and his daughter from his first marriage joined the communist resistance. As a result, the witness and her parents did not have to be deported after the war, but they lived modestly. During her studies at the chemical high school, she joined the Kontakt art group in Litvínov. Her husband Karel Folprecht came from a Czech-German marriage and was related to the trafficker Kilián Nowotny and the artist Otto Herbert Hajek. In 1967, the witness and her husband joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC); her husband was expelled during the post-1968 loyalty testing process, but she was able to stay thanks to her father’s past. Later on, they moved to Lubenec where she organised cultural and artistic life. She was active in a circle of artists who opposed the communist regime. After the Lubenec 88 exhibition, she was investigated by the State Security. The crackdown on free artistic expression forced her to exit the CPC. After the Velvet Revolution, she made a living as an artist, selling glass jewellery and writing books about the region around Lubenec and her native Erzgebirge. She lived in Lubenec in 2024.
From the 1980s onwards, visual artists would regularly meet in Lubenec in the local community centre, and the witness (left, at the head of the table) took an active part in the gatherings.
From the 1980s onwards, visual artists would regularly meet in Lubenec in the local community centre, and the witness (left, at the head of the table) took an active part in the gatherings.
The exhibition in Lubenec in 1988 featured a work by Ivan Kafka titled "The Shaky Peak" which, like others, carried a hidden meaning referring to the collapsing communist regime.
The exhibition in Lubenec in 1988 featured a work by Ivan Kafka titled "The Shaky Peak" which, like others, carried a hidden meaning referring to the collapsing communist regime.
