Jiřina Kozáková

* 1949

  • "Mostly it was the feeling that there are no borders, that you can go anywhere. Because if I go back to the period before 1989, we were staying with friends, a friend of mine, a classmate of mine, and a friend of my husband's from the factory, who live here in Budejovice, so we stayed at their house, it's called Šejby, and there was already the zone there, they were already on the patrols, the soldiers were on the guards and so on, we had to report that we were going there and who we were going to, we had to have our ID with us, and what the hell, the sclerotic lady left her ID at home, and they wouldn't let us in. So the friend and her husband had to come and explain that we were really going to their place, my friend's mother was a party girl, so maybe that was the reason why they could buy the house there, I don't know, I don't want to interfere, I don't know, but we were there, and when we saw the roadblocks, the wires, because you go there from Šejby a hundred meters and you're in Austria, there was a ditch... so we went around it, my husband and I went on sovereignly, and they got upset and said: 'You can't do that, there's a border here. They might start shooting at you! Or there could be trouble.' So we went back. That was before 1989. After '89, when we were there, it was nicely planned, we walked pretty much all the way to Austria and it was absolutely trouble-free. So that kind of freedom..."

  • "We didn't have to sign [the consent to the entry of Warsaw Pact troops], but we had to start introducing political things into any subject. I was teaching civics at the time, in addition to chemistry, and there it was simple, it was political, so let's put it that way. It was worse when I taught math. How do you fit that in? In chemistry, how do you fit it in? That was so complicated, but we had to do it, so we did it. The bulletin boards were obviously for that, we were happy to have those friends there, we had political training every week... we had to make reports out of that, it was always rotating, a topic was drawn, A team from the factory would come to train and test us, and they rotated, which was unpleasan, really very unpleasant..."

  • "Mostly they were Romanian Slovaks, but they came from the villages next door, like Suš, Svéráz, Zátoň, they came from there, so they had problems with the teaching, maybe they didn't understand properly. But there was nobody like that in Větřní, not even in Němčí, all the tribal people who lived there before the war, they stayed there, even though they had a connection with the Austrians, yeah, so they all stayed there, it was a kind of a closed community, I would say good people, although of course sometimes the farmer would look at us picking apples, or my friend and I, who came from that farm, we had a stove there, there were these ovens, you put what was left over from lunch to keep it warm, so many times my friend and I would go and eat a bit of it... so I know her mum wasn't too happy afterwards, but she never scolded us or forbade us to go to them... so as I say, there was a kind of a gated community there, it was a little bit more complicated in that Větřní, which was the original part, the classic Větřní, so those were the houses where the Germans really were and they had to move out. What I know from my friends, even though they would be ninety years old today, but they were friends of mine, they told me, they were still meeting, until the lady died, they were still meeting with the Germans. They lived with them partly and they were nice to each other. But there was a house next door, a farm, and it was the other way round, the Germans were doing... Well, they were saying goodbye to their property... I can't imagine that the house that my husband and I built, that I would be thrown out, I would be unpleasant too..."

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    České Budějovice, 28.05.2024

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I guess we didn’t feel so timid

Jiřina Kozáková in 1968
Jiřina Kozáková in 1968
photo: Archive of the witness

Jiřina Kozáková was born on 20 April 1949 in the village of Němče, which is now part of the village of Větřní in the Českokrumlov region. Her mother Ludmila Kunešová worked as an operator at the South Bohemian Paper Mills in Větřní, while her father Vojtěch Kuneš worked there in the accounting department. The young family lived with their grandparents on a farm, which they lost in the 1950s and then moved to Větřní. Here Jiřina Kozáková experienced the gradual emergence of the now excluded locality in Šumavská Street. In the 1960s she graduated from the Secondary Industrial School of Chemistry in Hostinné in Krkonoše. After graduating from the school, she started working as an educator at an apprenticeship in Větřní in 1968. In the sixties she experienced relaxation as a high school student and normalization as a worker in education. She recalls the pressures on the content of the teaching, which was to praise cooperation with the Soviet Union. She worked at the school until its demise in 1996. She then completed her qualification to teach chemistry and began working at the Secondary Medical School in Český Krumlov, where she taught until her retirement in 2009. Jiřina Kozáková raised two children, a daughter Halka and a son Jiří. In 2024 she lived in Větřní.