"We came to Kiev and we saw women working everywhere, on the railway and digging and so on. When we were staying in our hotel, the Youth Travel Agency arranged for us a reception with the local youth because the honeymoon was in fact a tour with the Youth Travel Agency. Of course the tables were sagging under the food and drinks, but what struck us was this. The girl who was on the train with us, the pilot's fiancée who was on the train with the pilot, shared a their compartment with us. We were on one side for the night and they were on the other. Probably through her fiancé, she got a beautiful outfit. She was blonde and wore a beautiful pale blue pantsuit to the banquet. Of course they wouldn't let her in. "No, pants, no pants! She had to go back to her room and change into a dress and a skirt."
"I think my father had a thresher, and so the hay cart couldn't fit with it and had to be parked in front of the house. One morning when my mother went to the store, she said, 'Where's the wagon, where's the hay cart, dad?' She looked up, and the cart was dismantled and parts hanged on a tree in front of the house."
"My uncle bought an older dilapidated house with two rooms for his family in Blatnice, and behind this house there was also a small old vineyard, so my uncle made a small amount of wine in a room in the yard for their own consumption. The uncle and his son became enemies of our people's democratic establishment and joined a network of dead drops. Their activities were exposed in the 1950s and the entire family was taken to the infamous prison in Uherské Hradiště. Aunt Marie was released after the detention because she was not proven to have participated in anti-state activities, but the uncle and son Vláďa were imprisoned and all their property was confiscated. After the amnesty in 1961, they were both released, and this is a photo from that very day when they came to thank my parents for helping aunt Marie while they were locked up."
“As I was in Blatnice, I led the local group of the Czechoslovak Union of Youth, nowadays the name is different again. Well. Every month I would send this quite detailed report on our activities to the Union committee in Hodonoín. I don't know if I was the only one who had been so dutiful. Or why would they take notice of me and then select me. So all of a sudden, I was selected and recommended by this Czechoslovak Union of Youth's district committee in Hodonín as a candidate for the Party membership. I had to be a candidate first. And they would also vouch for me that I would be a good Party member. So I joined the Party almost by accident. I guess I would had never joined them on my own accord.” - “Have you been thinking about whether to join the Party or was it just the thing to do?” - “No. I didn't think about that. As to me it was just like the other posts I had. So I had become a member. And after that, or maybe it was even before that, they recommended me to the district committee of public control and statistics.
“In the year of 1968, on August 12th, my son – or rather our son – was born. And I was on maternity leave. My husband had been working at Sigma research institute. And he called me from work: 'Turn the radio on! The Russians invaded us!' I was wondering how could the Russians, our brothers, attack us. And he said: 'Turn the radio on and you will find out.' I just didn't believe him. But that was the way it had been. Then everyone thought it would be just for a while, of course. But in the end we spent half of our lives in it.”
“There used to be a festival on Kateřina feast day, on November 25th. And the festival went on for a whole week. And I liked to go to school, I had excellent grades, but my parents knew how much I loved dancing. So they didn't want to hinder me and every time they would write me an excuse during the festival stating that I was having tonsillitis. And I spent the whole week of the festival dancing. I was one of the first to get there and one of the last to leave the dance party. So my parents were quite permissive. And later, I was maybe also quite permissive with my children.”
Jaroslava Jesenská, née Hanáková, was born on January 6th 1942 in Blatnice pod Svatým Antonínkem. Her father, Jan Hanák, joined the Communist party right after the February 1948 takeover, despite being a private farmer. Josef Žitňák, uncle of Jaroslava Jesenská, was a prisoner of both totalitarianisms of the 20th century - Nazi and Communist. But some of the Blatnice’s residents didn’t share his enthusiasm for the new era and gallows painted by lime started to appear on Hanák family farm’s gate. Witnesses’ older sister Marie also joined the Communist party right after her eighteenth birthday. At the time she was graduating from secondary school of education in Kroměříž, Jaroslava already led the local group of the Czechoslovak Union of Youth. Shortly after that, she had been offered to join the Communist party. After joining the Party, Jaroslava was recommended for a two-year follow-up study at an institute of education in Gottwaldov, she also became director of a kindergarten in Milokošť, in Veselí nad Moravou district. She assumed this position as just a twenty-year-old. In contrast, her husband, Rostislav, didn’t support the Communist regime. After the Warsaw pact invasion in 1968, he grew a beard, stating that he would shave himself after the invaders would leave the country. Jaroslava didn’t support the invasion neither and she had books by banned authors in her library, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Milan Kundera. During the “normalization” era, their children red Vokno, a sadmizdat revue, listened to songs by Karel Kryl and dressed in a fashion of so-called deliquent youth. Despite that, Jesenský family had been living in the spirit of tolerance and harmony. Jaroslava had been working as a director at several kindergartens till 1985; from 1986 to 1989, she had been working in Olomouc’s Labour Union’s District Committee’s department of labour union education. After the Velvet Revolution, Jaroslava Jesenská gave herself a present on the International Women’s Day and left the Communist party.
