"We actually felt it the most then as our family, although it wasn't like that, we didn't go to prison or get investigated, we were just warned. My cousin on my dad's side, he was older than me, so he was due to join the military service in 1969. They were already living in Teplice, I think, well, and a lot of people were escaping, both the political ones, who were involved in opposing, so then they had to escape with their families, or they were doing badly, so they fled to the West, they said. And he escaped too, so by... uncle told us, now I don't know if they came or wrote to us, so that we wouldn't be frightened, that they would certainly investigate us, that simply Pepík had escaped."
"My mum and dad were like, 'Just don't get involved in anything!' when I started in Prague in September. Well, the first thing was that I got on the strike committee. That's how we started school with the class teacher. The trouble of it, because there were more of them. Although it started to turn right away, by Christmas it was all hushed up, it wasn't allowed, it stopped being talked about. I don't know more or less, there was no bad mark for behaviour because of that, but then it died down. Everybody, even the professors weren't allowed to speak anymore if they wanted to continue teaching. So then we went through that school in such a way that there were boundaries, you weren't allowed there, you weren't allowed to say that, it was written here what you could say."
"As far back as I can remember, we had a cow and a calf, and when the normalization [collectivization] came after 1953, it was different in the villages then, that they were taking away from those farmers, so they took away... they just came and [people] had to hand over a tractor, a thresher, just whatever they had in agriculture that they needed. Then they also took the cattle away, so they took our calf first, so we were crying. Then the cow, I remember I used to go to my grandmother when she was milking, with a tin can to get milk. I remember that, I cried about that too. And it was so hard for those people because they actually had those animals as family members."
Jaromíra Jankovská, née Václavíčková, was born on 6 June 1953 in the village of Jelen near Kolín. During collectivisation, the cattle had to be given to the unified agricultural cooperative (JZD), which she felt strongly as a child. In 1969, her cousin emigrated to the West and because of this she had problems being admitted to university after graduation. She married in 1973 and had three children. After her maternity leave, she worked at Jednota in Veletov and later at the lock in Týnec nad Labem. After 1989 she served as mayor of Veletov. In 2023 she was living in Veletov.
