"I returned home. It was the end of the week [apparently 24 November 1989]. My son was to come back from school. It was evening, my son had not come. We were waiting, there were no mobile phones, of course. And then he came back at night. Local State Security or Public Security were catching students who got off the Prague bus and they were searching their backpacks. There was awfully little information here at that time about what was going on in Prague, in the Civic Forum, about the whole central situation. That's why my son used to bring various posters, printed materials, pictures from Prague. So they caught him, they took him to the National Security Corps office, which is on I. P. Pavlova Street, where they have recently demolished the whole building next to the Thermal. And there they interrogated him and took notes of everything he brought in, why he was doing it. But he had been bringing various materials before, so we had information from Prague. And that time, unfortunately, he was caught. They sent him back home at night telling him that his dad should give him a beating. Dad didn't beat him, of course, but he praised him."
"The normalisation hit us much harder because in 1969 my husband [Vladimír Kulhánek] was already fired due to the fact that he was the founder of KAN, that is, the Club of Committed Non-Party Members here in Karlovy Vary, together with František Brož, a lawyer. Brož was the chairman, my husband was the vice-chairman. My husband used to travel here around the whole Karlovy Vary region, they had meetings, and it was such a breath of freedom. And then when normalisation came, my husband had lists of people who wanted to join or had joined KAN. He had all kinds of other documents about the situation, and we had it in the attic behind a beam at the time of normalisation. And then my husband preferred to burn it all, in case we were searched and it was found, so that these people would not be persecuted or otherwise compromised. So that was 1969. So my husband stopped being a teacher of mathematics and physics. By then we were both teaching at the school in Poštovní [Street] in Tuhnice. I was pregnant. But there was no consideration of any family circumstances. Fortunately, my husband was very fond of manual work, especially construction, so he applied for a job as a foreman at the Municipal Construction Company here in Karlovy Vary and was in charge of a bunch of bricklayers. My husband completed his evening studies at the secondary technical school, it was possible then, here in Karlovy Vary. And he worked with concrete, they were making concrete floor or whatever they did there, he told me abou it. But a local town representative came there. And he was amazed that this fired teacher, they were called counterrevolutionaries back then, this counterrevolutionary person was leading a group of bricklayers there. He [my husband] might have a negative influence on them! And that's why my husband was immediately fired during that month, when it was still a probation period for the employees. Brazenly, they offered him a a worker´s job in the company. A teacher, a university mathematician, a physicist. Fortunately, there was a company in Nejdek called Armabeton and they were willing to hire him as a foreman in the construction industry, too. And since then he worked for twenty years on construction sites here in the region. Mainly in Nejdek they were building a wool plant and then in Sokolov a chemical plant. So that was 1969 for our family."
"Since I was born in 1942, my memories are very sketchy and I know the whole situation mainly from my parents' stories. We lived on Údolní Street and there, when there were air raids, I remember that we ran into a shelter. Apparently it was in the same house in the cellar. I have only a fragmentary memory of us sitting in the corner. I can see a small window up there, and there's sand falling from there, and I can see shoes running past. And that's it. I know from my parents that we were squeezed there in that corner, they were holding me in their arms, so that if the house got hit, all three of us would stay there, so none of us would be left."
"Those were the records in the back that we, the shop assistants... There were three saleswomen and the woman manager. And we weren't allowed to sell those [undercounter records], she was the one who kept an eye on them. At the most, when we said that those and those acquaintances would be coming... Once I committed a big offense because the Semafor theatre was visiting Karlovy Vary. And at that time we had under the counter a triple LP of Bouquet (Kytice), the Semafor show, to this day it's the most successful Semafor show and I love it very much. And Ferdinand Havlík came to see if we had the Bouquet LP. Well, you know, I ran to the back and I brought it to him. But then, of course, the whole Semafor ensemble came in one by one and I was selling, selling, selling. Could I say no to these people? Then the woman manager was very upset and I was not praised by her. For selling people from Semafor their product. But otherwise, for example, records from India were delivered - and they were a hundred crowns. These were Indian records sealed in plastic. We weren't even allowed to play them. That was before Christmas. And the fans were already coming before Christmas and asking when the Indian records were coming. So then when the goods came, we locked the shop up. We always locked up when we were taking over the goods. The familiar sign: Goods are being received. And then again there were lists of who could come and buy an Indian record."
Former teacher, instructor and publisher Jitka Kulhánková was born on 18 September 1942 in Brno. Her father, Jiří Konárek, had a law degree and worked as secretary of the Brno Union of Industrialists; her mother, Ludmila, née Hamalová, ran a prestigious Brno dressmaker’s. Jitka Kulhánková’s early memories include the Allied bombing of Brno in 1944, the liberation and the arrival of the Red Army in Brno. After the war, the family moved to Hradec Králové, where Jiří Konárek continued to work as secretary of the Union of Industrialists. After the February 1948 coup, however, the family had to move out of their Hradec Králové flat and moved to Prague, where her father worked as a company lawyer. The family was not directly politically persecuted, yet the girl bore the stigma of bourgeois origin. After graduating from a secondary general education school in 1960, she was not admitted to the Academy of Performing Arts, Theatre Faculty (DAMU), acting programme, neither to the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, although she successfully passed the entrance exams at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. She enrolled at the Higher Pedagogical School in Karlovy Vary, where she chose the Czech-Russian major and later added English. Already during her studies (1963) she married her older classmate Vladimír Kulhánek (1939-2021), whom she had known from a basketball team. After graduating from higher school, she started teaching at an apprentice school in Chodov u Karlových Varů, and later taught at the Antonín Zápotocký Primary School in Karlovy Vary, at the school in Janáčkova (now Poděbradská) Street and at the school in Poštovní Street. In 1968, she signed the manifesto Two Thousand Words and was giving it to her colleagues in the teachers´ room to sign. At the same time, her husband was co-founding the Karlovy Vary branch of the Club of Committed Non-Party Members (KAN). In 1969, Vladimír Kulhánek was fired from his teaching position and worked as a bricklayers´ foreman at the Armabeton company. Jitka Kulhánková was dismissed a year after her return from maternity leave (1973). She then worked as a shop assistant at Supraphon and later as an instructor of users of newly introduced office computers. Already during 1989 (before November) she took advantage of the newly introduced small private business opportunities and taught computer work privately. Since 1990, she has also extended this micro-teaching to include teaching English. Her husband, Vladimír Kulhánek, became involved in local politics in 1990, becoming deputy mayor of Karlovy Vary and he was elected to the Senate in 1996. In 1992, Jitka Kulhánková began publishing the magazine Promenáda, a monthly information magazine intended primarily for visitors to Karlovy Vary, which she published until 2014. She was involved in many fundraising and charity projects, including organizing a fundraising relay for the restoration of the Karlovy Vary theatre building. She participated in the Páralparty project for the restoration of pavilions in the spa town forests, supported SOS villages and the local branch of Tyfloservis. She is the author of a travel book about Little Tibet called The Vanishing Ladakh and a co-author of two book editions of Get-Together with Jan Burian. Her son Petr Kulhánek was the mayor of Karlovy Vary (2010-2018) and is now (since 2020) the President of the Karlovy Vary Regional Council.
Christmas 1943 in Brno, 27 Údolní Street. Jitka Kulhánková as a toddler, from the right his maternal grandmother and grandfather, paternal grandfather and grandmother, standing parents and aunt
Christmas 1943 in Brno, 27 Údolní Street. Jitka Kulhánková as a toddler, from the right his maternal grandmother and grandfather, paternal grandfather and grandmother, standing parents and aunt
