Helena Koníčková

"I know that after the 1968, I projected slides for children (note: photos on canvas) during civic education. It must have been something about the Soviet Union (note: tendentious, promotional photography). The children revolted to see such pictures. I said then, 'Don't make it hard for me, I'm glad I don't have to talk about it, so I projected those pictures.' The fact is, no one reported me that I said that. And then the children did a survey of favorite teachers, so I got to the first place in this class. So, I don't know if it was because of this experience."

"Balls, local organizations were organized in the pub. In the 1951, hunters had a ball there. There were quarrels between the hunters, and there was a shooting. Then, it was investigated how it all came together. Someone should have said that the innkeeper had heard some insults to the regime. So, our mother, she was my third mother, was questioned by the police. But she didn't hear anything, she wasn't there. Her aunt still helped her in the pub in the kitchen. And they wanted to know what my mother heard, and she heard nothing. She was not allowed to say anything about the interrogation. She just said, for example, that they were spinning a chair on which she was sitting round and round. She had problems from that. She also had to go through a psychological therapy afterwards, because it really messed her up a lot."

"It happened in the days of May, when weapons were found in the concert hall of our pub. As there were shootings in Příšovice between the Germans and the people who decided to run the resistance movement at the end of the war. I think Rosenbaum was the general in Přepeřice. He led the resistance movement there and volunteers reported to him. The captured weapons were stored in our concert hall. However then, there was the news that the German army was approaching from Liberec. So, the whole resistance group, as my dad told me, broke up. My dad was scared too, he knew what could happen. He didn't know what to do with it. Mrs. Marie Lhotová, she was Mr. Lhota's sister, who ran our pub, so she and my father tried to hide the equipment and the weapons somewhere. I have such vague memories that I sensed it then. They took it to the morgue in the cemetery and threw it near a neighbor´s fence. And it ended with that.” (Note: Helena Koníčková realized that this ball had to take place later, perhaps in the 1970s.)

"We wrote reports on all the children when they were leaving school, and about the fact that their parents were in the Czechoslovak Communist Party, or that they had been deleted, or that the parents had been expelled from the party, it all had to be there. Without that, the report could not leave. The class teacher wrote the reports, and it was always terrible to write this. That sentence must have been there, it was ordered."

"The checks took place at school. And I was quite [suffering], it wasn't a nice time, because there were informants. And someone apparently said that I allegedly posted the SČSP (The Union of Czechoslovak friendship) ID card on some barn, on some barn door. And so, I was completely shocked. Then I went to the teachers´ room, so I brought it there to show that I have it, that I didn't post it anywhere. Then I was just told, 'Well, you don´t have it all correct.' Because the stamp was there very loosely. And they criticized other things too, of course, during the inspections, it was not nice. So, I was quite OK there, but then I know in the teachers‘ room that I was hysterical about it."

"And then when the August 1968 came, so Bousov, you probably know it from Bousovák (the monthly journal), that there are records that various material came here from other cities and people started writing various banners against the occupation. Well, it also says here in Bousovák that the first banner was actually made already the next morning. There were tanks actually across the square. And Franta and I wrote the banner at night, probably no one in Bousov knows. We put it on bars like that and it was in that park, where St. Nicholas day was celebrated now. [...] There were the tanks in the park, we went to hammer it there and it was there. I understood Russian, so there it was written: “1945 liberators освободи́тель” - it was in Cyrillic - and “1968 occupiers”.

"When I started working in the school here, I have always been such a conscientious person, and the school principal quite liked that about me. And he told me already in the first year when I was teaching here that I should join the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Well, in the end, I went to my dad, saying, 'What am I supposed to do?' Well, my dad was that kind of a man, well, he was worried about me, he said: 'Well, just in case you don´t have problems because you did not join, so do it.' So, I did. My husband had already joined the party while he was in military service. [...] So we were both in the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Well, that was a big mistake, because then we paid a lot for it in 1968.”