“The teacher asked us the names of our parents. When I said that my father’s name was Hubert, I think that the children in the classroom have never heard this name. It was not a particularly nice name, and I think that the children made fun of me a little bit. I wanted to have everything just like the other children, but we spoke in a different way at home and we spoke differently at school. As children we thus did not know where we belonged. Of course, when the other children wanted to become members of the Pioneer organization, I wanted to become a Pioneer, too. Eventually, we [with my sister] did not really show it, but we were not too happy that our father was a German and that we differed from the other children.”
“The year 1968. I remember that I worked in the city square and they did not let anybody in there because there was shooting going on there. They were only allowing those people who worked there. We were quite scared. My colleague lived right under the archway there and they nearly broke into his flat. Really, some flats which were in the front, really collapsed. I remember that sister Livečková, who lived here, died as a result of a rebounded bullet. We watched it directly from the optician store. After the shooting began, we then did not go to work for about two days because we had young children and we were afraid and we did not know what would happen, whether there would be a war, and so we went to buy some groceries, above all, because it was a time when we did not actually know what would happen.”
“They gave me an application form for the faculty of arts. I had written my desired fields of study there. I wanted to study Russian, probably together with Czech. But I was not admitted due to the reference letter, because they wrote there that my mom was partly inclined towards the West and that my father disdained the current political situation, and that both children – I have one sister – were not being raised in a socialistic society and that we did not participate in work brigades in our village... There were many such things; I still have the document at home. It also said that I appeared to be a foppish young girl, that I wore red and black stockings and things like that. We submitted an appeal to the district committee, but the gentleman, the comrade, who had written the assessment for me, had his brother at the district committee, and so they turned the appeal down. We went to the regional authority, but they rejected it, too, because his influence reached all the way there. Mom then went with me, and we complained in the president’s office, but they simply told me that I was allowed to study, but that I was only allowed to study dentistry or hygiene. I did not accept that, because I don’t like these fields of study.”
Hannelore Kalenská, née Hübnerová, was born on April 4, 1943 in Doubí near Liberec in a mixed Czech-German family as the first one of two daughters. Her father Herbert Hübner, a German, was a handicapped war veteran who had lost his arm in combat. Her mother Božena Hübnerová was a Czech and she did administrative work. Hannelore’s parents were not included in the deportations of Germans after WWII and they remained in the Liberec area, but they faced troubles due to her father’s German nationality. Before she turned five, Hannelore spoke German with her parents, and she only learnt to speak Czech in school. After elementary school she continued with her studies at the secondary healthcare school for opticians in Jablonec nad Nisou. She did not receive a recommendation for university study due to her lack of involvement and her father’s German nationality. She began working in an optician store in Liberec. Later she married and she started a family. While in Liberec she witnessed the events of 21st August 1968 and the entry of the Warsaw Pact armies to Czechoslovakia. Hannelora Kalenská is now a widow and she lives in Liberec.
