“The sad thing was that the end of it was nowhere in sight. When the Prague Spring and such was defeated, people just ‘shut themselves’ into these small ‘social nuclei’, or like-minded groups. I live in Motol, and our cellar is fitted out like a clubroom with a fireplace, and that’s where we lived basically. We sang songs and played fine records such as recordings from the Semafor theatre and Vodňanský & Skoumal’s songs. It was said people simply ‘shut off the world’, just minding their ‘car, cottage, and mistress’. The previously arisen nation, which had been experiencing political changes and hope, suddenly gave up – people just couldn’t see any ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ and simply shut themselves inside private groups and partied.”
“There were barricades in our neighbourhood; they were cleared later. The entire Motol quarter survived thanks to Vlasov’s RLA. I remember exactly when the Red Army arrived. It was some three or four days after the RLA had escaped because they were in danger. So many of them were killed there. My dad and a neighbour carried the wounded RLA men to the Motol hospital, which served as a military hospital at the time. Dad said they were immensely courageous but was worried about what could happen to them afterwards. They just saved us. There were military barracks in the current Motol tram depot area, and the Nazis were settled in the barracks. People said a Nazi military train was carrying ammunition along the narrow-gauge track that goes from Hostivice to the Smíchov station, and the Nazis would pick out men to shoot along the way in the old part of Motol, in front of the crematory. That was dramatic; the atmosphere was really tense. The men were saved eventually. The Nazis either fled or were captured. I still remember where this happened; there were like three graves of RLA soldiers, and today, there’s a sign that says ‘Two unknown partisans’.”
“Cadre-related matters were discussed at a whispering volume in the staff room. ‘Come here, come here!’ We walked over to the corner of the room and they said: ‘Things are looking bleak for Ms Nováková, she’s in trouble because of her uncle, so be careful.’ The few of us who were not in the [communist] party would alert each other, or we knew who was who. After all, we were ‘those from Prague’. The local teachers and those who came from Všetaty and Neratovice knew the background, the political backgrounds of various students’ families. So, this is how it was talked about.”
Linguist and dialectologist Jaroslava Hlavsová was born in Prague on 16 June 1934 and grew up in a rental apartment in a villa in the Prague quarter of Motol. Her parents, Františka and Jaroslav Böhms came from the Krkonoše promontory region, and the father was a bank official. She started studying at the Drtina Girls’ High School in Prague-Smíchov in the autumn of 1944, and got to witness the dramatic end of the war in Motol: barricades were being built, and Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army fought hard with the retreating Wehrmacht in the neighbourhood. After the war, Jaroslava Hlavsová was active in Sokol and took part in the sports association XI. general gathering in the summer of 1948. Her father was dismissed from the bank in 1949, suffered a nervous breakdown, retired for bad health, and the family lived humbly on his disability pension. Jaroslava took her school-leaving exams in 1952 with honours, but was not recommended for university studies on political grounds. On her class teacher’s suggestion, she lodged an appeal and was eventually admitted to the Faculty of Arts to study Czech and Russian. She was selected for scholarly work as one of six students, but was unable to find a job in her field after graduation and went on to teach Czech and Russian at the Grammar School in Mělník. In addition to her job, she was the leader and choreographer of the Blaťan folkloric ensemble. In 1962, she accidentally came across a job offer from the Czech Language Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences; it was seeking a worker with her precise specialisation – dialectology. She passed the entry test and spent the rest of her professional life mapping Czech dialects. The result of her work is the Czech Language Atlas in five tomes. She retired in 1992 but continued teaching Czech to foreigners. Following 1989, she was active in politics, working in a regional council of the ODS and serving on election panels. Jaroslava Hlavsová passed away on September, the 9th, 2023.
