"The MPs said, for example, 'I've never been to Finland, why don't you write to Finland and tell them we want to form an inter-parliamentary group?´ They gave me a list of 10 MPs, that was the group, it was called a group of friends, a group of friends of Finland, for example. I wrote to our ambassador in Finland and I said, 'We have this group here, can you make contact with the Finnish parliament? Either the group wasn't there, or maybe they set it up, so they set up a group of friends of the Czech Republic and then they could go to Finland, which I organised and accompanied them. So sometimes it was really that the MPs decided that they wanted to go to Indonesia, so they set up a group of friends and went there. But I didn't go there, because then my leader went, who of course wanted to enjoy the trip too, even though I organised it."
"When it started getting close to going to high school, it was around the second grade that I started to notice it a lot. Like, at school, we'd all put together a present for the teacher, but my mom would bring me a book and say, 'Here's a book that the English teacher will like, so give it to her separately so she'll remember you, so she'll write something for your report card.' So I was just always doing something extra, not really mean things, but something. And that kept me away from the collective. I was never a part of the core group and I kept to myself in that school. And things like that, going up to a teacher and bringing her a special gift, it didn't improve my standing in that class."
"Actually, the defining thing for my whole childhood was that I knew we had a problem as a family, that my parents said, 'You know, my grandfather was locked up,' but they didn't want to talk about it. They never told me exactly why he was locked up, I knew he was unjustly locked up, that's what they told me, that he made one stamp. But we never talked about the trials or how exactly it was. So I had very little information about it. And the other thing was that they said that the mother had been fired or cut out of the party. 'We're just plastered all over it and we have to try very hard to get you into these schools because they might not take you either.'So it was always the case at home that it was clear that communism as such was nonsense. Of course nobody believed those slogans, neither we as children nor our parents were careerists. They didn't do that, for example, that my father would try to join the party, on the contrary they offered it to him at the apprenticeship, he didn't join. He could have been a deputy and he refused of course."
Klára Jirásková, née Novotná, was born on 15 July 1967 in Prague to Maria and Oldřich Novotný. Her paternal grandfather, Oldřich Novotný Sr., produced fake passport stamps for alleged emigrants in 1949 and was arrested in August of that year. In the staged trial of Maděra and Co. in the summer of 1950, he was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment for complicity in the crime of treason. He was released on amnesty in 1960. During her childhood, she experienced a constant search for connections and adjustment to the regime, as her parents feared that she would not be admitted to high school and college because of the family’s tarnished cadre profile. They hardly talked about her grandfather’s past at home. The family did not directly support communism, but out of caution they did not speak out against it. In 1981-1985, Klára Jirásková studied at the Na Vítězné pláni gymnasium, and in 1985-1989 at the Faculty of Law of Charles University. From 1989 she worked in the foreign department of Supraphon, in 1991-1993 she worked in the newly established branch of the music publishing company Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) and from 1994 as a clerk in the foreign department of the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic. After 2000 she devoted herself to teaching foreign languages. In 2024 she lived in Poděbrady.
Klára Jirásková (second from right) with her younger sister Denisa, her mother Maria Novotná and grandparents Maria and Svatopluk Hrbek, Karlovy Vary, 1979
Klára Jirásková (second from right) with her younger sister Denisa, her mother Maria Novotná and grandparents Maria and Svatopluk Hrbek, Karlovy Vary, 1979
