Suzette Hejdová

* 1946

Dissident, Foreigner living in Czechoslovakia before the year 1989, Relatives of important personalities
1. 1. 1977 - Declaration of Chart 77, 5. 1. - 21. 8. 1968 - The Prague Spring, 21. 8. 1968 - Invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, 1989 - The fall of the iron curtain, 17. 11. - 29. 12. 1989 - The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia
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    The bitterness that hasn't gone away

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    duration: 00:33
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    "But bitterness within me remained, and it has never gone away. That the political change after 1989 was not as great, as deep, as it would have needed to be for the country to truly emerge from that past."

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    Wounds that haven't fully healed

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    duration: 01:07
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    "Brave? I don't know. We didn't live in the '50s. In the fifties, Zbyněk would have been locked up like many people for maybe ten years, I don't know if I would have continued living here then. Or they would have thrown us out and not allowed us to come back. I don't know. That's what I felt, that life here is not as hard as it was then, in the fifties. But still, they managed to make life here so bad that to this day, I have wounds from it that haven't completely healed."

  • 3
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    Watched by State Security

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    duration: 00:52
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    "I considered myself a completely unimportant person, and I don't understand why State Security followed me at all. They probably thought I had a much more important position here. They didn't realize I was only concerned with living here adequately and decently. But, indeed, I was fully connected with what my husband was doing - I supported him, and I never reproached him that we were in such a situation because of the signing of the Charter. It was probably enough for them that I praised the actions of the dissidents."

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    The first days after the signing of Charter 77

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    duration: 01:13
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    "I was a little bit terrified because I didn't know how it would be with him and them after the signing of Charter 77, how they would continue with their arrests. I lived in fear, but I suspected that it would be like that in a country like it was then. Someone wondered why Zbyněk didn't ask me whether he should sign or not. But in this, I thought it right that he should have a perfectly free hand and decide these things on his own. But I remember those first days. When they came for him to the antiquarian bookshop..."

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    A difficult decision

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    duration: 00:32
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    "It was not a difficult decision. I wanted to be with Zbyněk anyway. I have to say that for me, he was a person who so dazzled me, mentally, that that was the most important thing. This may sound stupid, but it is true."

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    21 August in Prague

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    duration: 00:47
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    "Of course, 21 August in Prague. I can still describe that day to date. I remember it very precisely. I turned on the radio, I was in Paris, I was preparing for some exams that I had neglected because of the events of May, and at the same time I was listening to what was happening in Prague on the radio. It was a shock, a big shock, I told myself that I was definitely done with the communists."

  • Full recordings
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    Praha, 27.01.2020

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    duration: 01:34:36
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    Praha, 09.06.2020

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    duration: 01:29:45
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To live here properly and decently

Suzette Hejdová in 2020
Suzette Hejdová in 2020
photo: Post Bellum
photo: Post Bellum
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Suzette Hejdová (née Gazagne) was born on 10 September 1946 in the south of France to a winemaker. She studied at the lycée in Nîmes, where she graduated in 1964. She then went on to study French literature, geography and Russian at the University of Montpellier and continued her studies of Russian language and literature in Paris and Nanterre, respectively. The events of 1968 awakened her interest in Czechoslovakia, where she went on a scholarship to study at Charles University. She then united with the poet and Charter 77 signatory Zbyněk Hejda, with whom she started a family, and thus also became part of the dissent. She worked as a teacher at the French school in Štěpánská Street, then at the French Institute in Prague. In 2020, she lived in Prague.

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