"And there was this answer to everything: Who will be responsible for it? When the gates to the village open, who will be responsible if something happens to someone? More importantly, in some of those villages, the villagers did not want it. They were afraid of them. They were afraid of them. They were afraid of the unknown: What's behind the fence? And why are they locked behind that fence? As my knowledge of these people grew deeper, I found out that even though I was left alone in an institution where there were a hundred mentally handicapped men suffering from mild, moderate, but also very severe disability, and some may have been aggressive, I was never afraid of any of them."
"When they took me to one of the institutions for disabled children, they had a party. They recited poems for their mothers, but none of those mothers were there. They were not there because the parents used to be convinced that they should put the disabled child in an institution, that they would be provided with the best there. And those children stayed there for years. They were treated, but it was all so sad, even depressed. I came home then, I cried so much."
"And this beautiful student event was a student majáles, when the writer Josef Škvorecký was elected king of majáles, who soon after emigrated and lived his life in Canada. We had a number of his books. Later it was forbidden literature, but for us it was someone we knew personally and whom we greatly respected."
Jiřina Kovářová was born on April 18, 1946 in Olomouc. In 1968, she participated in student celebrations of so called Majáles in Olomouc, the king of which was elected Josef Škvorecký, a writer. She studied medicine at Palacký University in Olomouc and then started working as a doctor in the anaesthesiology and resuscitation department at a small district hospital. Later, she worked in a hospital for the long-term sick in several social care facilities. It introduced changes that generally contributed both to improving the overall situation in the institutions and to changing the public’s view of the wards. The witness also worked in homes for the elderly. In 1988, she organized the Academy of the Third Age. After 1989, she established cooperation with the Austrian Lebenshilfe Institute in the Austrian federal state of Vorarlberg. Between 1999 and 2002, the witness organized a counseling center for the elderly. In her free time, she also lectured at the Higher Vocational School of Social and Pedagogy in Kroměříž and Zlín. After fifteen years of work in the field of social services, the witness received an offer to work as a geriatrician in the Hospital of the Merciful Sisters of St. Vincence de Paul. Already at retirement age, she started working in the internal medicine department at the Psychiatric Hospital in Kroměříž. At the time of filming, she lived (2015) in Kroměříž.
