“After the Velvet Revolution, I was a subscriber of the Literary Newspaper. There was an article about Milada Horáková. A name of my relative was mentioned in the article. Certain Mr. Tuzar from Přeštice, whose sister got married to my mom’s brother. Although they were relatives, he didn’t keep in touch, but we met them in the town from time to time, we were going to his shop, he had a company for electric products… A very skillful man. He then got interned in Terezín during the war. He was a really skillful electrician. And he was helping Milada Horáková! He allegedly helped to construct a radio transmitter for her from some trash and from old radios or what not, and she was thus really able to maintain contacts with the West. She was ordering medicines! Well, perhaps he was helping her with it, handling the radio device somehow, but she used it to order medicines. The Red Cross was delivering medicines for the patients there, for the prisoners. But this Mr. Tuzar became a Communist after the war. He was a bit too fervent at first, but he didn’t harm anybody... He even made his brother-in-law join the Party as well. My uncle was a businessman, and I don’t now what he hoped to gain by joining the communists, because he eventually lost his wonderful shop.”
“He was lieutenant colonel when they dismissed him from the army and when they subsequently rehabilitated him, they promoted him to the colonel’s rank. They did not raise his allowance, however. They even gave him some decoration for merit, for his efforts in the army during the normalization period. But he didn’t serve in the army at all during that time, you know? I asked him: ‘Why did you receive that decoration? If I were you, I would have thrown it at them!’ My husband replied: ‘Those who handle the matter were young guys, if I had refused the decoration, they would have had to send it back and write an explanatory letter because of me…”
“Marlene Dietrich, the German singer, arrived there for the great celebration of the American holiday. The way she was dressed… we were a countryside town, and she arrived there in a dashing robe made from some transparent light green fabric, and in golden sandals, and the poor girl had to stagger over our town square which was not yet paved. Everyone was dangling after her, she was to have some performance in the evening, and I was invited there, because my mom’s friend provided accommodation for some officers in her apartment, and in return they invited her to come for the show and she thus took me with her, but Marlene was unable to sing, and it was not good...”
“Well, it was quite bold of me, but I got up and went there… At that time, I had no idea about the nasty things they were doing. I walked up to the committee to ask them about it. When I came there and questioned the clerk about who was the person who forbade it, he didn’t want to tell me… but it must have been surely someone from the Party! I thus went there, and I talked to some other gentleman, and eventually I learnt that our husbands allegedly didn’t deserve our visit, because their study performance was poor and they didn’t pay much attention to their studies. I asked him: ‘How come? My husband got straight 5s!’ In Russia, to get a five is like to get an A, it’s the best grade. ‘Fine, fine, but the thing is, if our women arrived there in their best clothes and looked like princesses, whereas the Soviet women did not have such nice clothes after the war… it would do no good.’ Naturally, there could be some jealousy.”
“It served for nothing, and the state farms then took over it, and it was a disaster. They confiscated the land from all landholders, from all who owned over fifty hectares. There were about twenty independent farms in the district, and all became appropriated by the state. At first they allowed the original owners to live there as administrators; these people were true farmers and knew what to do, but then they got rid off them and the farms went bust. They hired a clerk for every farm, because under the new system, they had to fill out receipts and delivery forms for everything, and nobody knew how to do it. The clerks were sending these papers to the headquarters, and other clerks were then filing the forms by the date or by the farm, and what was it all for? I don’t know; they must have been throwing it into the stove, because it was of no use.”
“We had no news. Some people had radios, and listened to them kneeling in the corner of the room in order to catch some broadcast from Czechoslovakia, but normally nobody cared for that. From time to time some information appeared in the local press, but we actually didn’t know anything. I don’t remember how we got the news… we were actually told by the Egyptians about the entry of the Warsaw Pact armies to Czechoslovakia. My husband went for a shave to the barber’s in the morning, and the barber expressed his sympathy with what was happening in our country. My husband didn’t know about it…”
“One of my cousins told me about it… My father worked for the district administration office, and in the early 1950s, one night he allegedly unexpectedly arrived to their house and said that he needed to speak to Josef in order to warn him. Uncle didn’t want to sign the agreement to join the Unified Agricultural Cooperatives. He used to say that they would need to kill him first. He kept a rifle behind the door. That day, my dad learnt – some honest man probably informed him – that the following morning they planned to arrive to uncle’s house with a lorry and relocate him somewhere to the border region. My dad thus got up, went about four stations by train and from there he walked. It must have been eight kilometres at least. He went there in order to warn uncle and to tell him not to use the rifle, because they would then either executed him or evicted them. Uncle thus signed the agreement.”
“When my husband went to Egypt for the first time, he had a laboratory assistant with him, because it was not customary for a professor who delivers a lecture to dirty his hands with some instruments, and he thus had an assistant when he needed to demonstrate something. The laboratory assistant was a wonderful man, a very honest man, who then told him: ‘You know, Zdeněk, I am no laboratory assistant. I don’t understand it at all, you need to tell me what to tell them or what to do. I am here to watch you.’”
Jindřiška Kohoutková, née Voráčková, was born April 18, 1926 in Přeštice. Her mother was a housewife, and her father, an ardent Sokol-member, worked as a clerk. In 1941 she began studying a Special Girls’ School for Ladies’ Professions, but she did not complete her studies because in 1944 she was forced to start working as a clerk at the farm in Lužany. While there, she experienced the liberation of the western part of Czechoslovakia by the American army, and later the collectivization of agricultural farms, which affected a part of her family as well. In 1950 she married Zdeněk Kohoutek, a Czechoslovak army officer and graduate of the Military Medical Academy of S. M. Kirov in Leningrad. In 1965 her husband was sent to Egypt together with his family to work there under the programme of Czechoslovak aid and to establish a system of military education in the Arab countries. In 1970 he refused to sign a defamatory assessment for two of his colleagues and as a result he was dismissed from the army. After his return to Czechoslovakia he was not allowed to have any job, and his family was barely surviving on the minimalallowance they were receiving. Her husband was fully rehabilitated in the 1990s. Jindřiška Kohoutová lived in an old people’s home in Brno, she still led a very busy life and occasionally she hold lectures about Egypt. Jindřiška Kohoutková died on February 2, 2022.
