Marcela Kýrová

* 1944

  • “A packed train, and a single compartment with only two people in it, myself and a certain Mrs Maršálková, who introduced herself to me. She said: ‘You must be smuggling some contraband German marks like myself, look, I’ve sown them into my bra right here, a whole hundred.’ I told her I wasn’t smuggling anything, I had nothing on me but the twelve marks they’d given me, I’d be taken care of by my mum’s friend. So, we came to Würzburg, I got off, Mrs Maršálková kept staring out of the window, so I waved her good-bye, and I say to auntie Mici: ‘Look, auntie, that woman there was tailing me and now she’s leaving.’ Auntie laughed and said: ‘No worries, someone else is taking over as we speak.’ We were walking around the town, when I noticed a guy who I had spotted several times before always somewhere around us, and so I say: ‘Auntie, that must be the guy who took over at the station.’ He was standing right up close to us, and so I turned around and started staring straight at him. He disappeared into thin air! They have a way of making off, these secret coppers, before you know it, he was gone.”

  • “I applied for the permit to travel West. In those days, they gave you 12 German marks as pocket money. Once you applied for the permit, the secret coppers contacted you and wanted you to report to them afterwards, wanted to know what you had done and who you had met. Of course, they came to me, too. The party chairman Štěpán came to see me and said I had visitors. He led me to an office where there were two guys waiting. And they said I’ve applied for the permit, and it was up to them to approve it or turn it down. In those days I exchanged letters with one guy from West Germany and they wanted me to hang around him and find out what he was working on, directly in his office. And I said: ‘I’m not doing that, I’m not cut out for this kind of thing, and above all, he’s in Munich, and I’m going to Würzburg.’ – ‘We would send you down on a special purpose trip. We’d give you a little secret camera and you’d take pictures of his work.’ He was an engineer. They simply wanted me to take pictures of his drawing board, for example. And I said: ‘Not my type of thing, I’d mess it up, they would be able to tell I wasn’t playing fair. Absolutely no way.’ And they said: ‘Well, then we might not let you go.’ And I said: ‘So I’m going nowhere. Not travelling out, not coming back. I haven’t seen it so far and I won’t in the future, either. It’s not the end of the world.’ Eventually, they let me go anyway.”

  • “And my granddad was banished, fortunately he had relatives in Bezvěrov not far from Krašov, so that’s where he went. I don’t know how long he went for, but a good few years. He got banished so that he couldn’t corrupt people’s minds with his capitalist ideology and so on. They moved an older lady into our room that used to be his. She merely put her furniture in and came to visit once a month. She was being deeply apologetic. That’s how the communists did it. She was a decent human being. My mum would always serve coffee and cake and we would chat.”

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    Praha, 11.05.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:30:01
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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The Coppers Had a Way of Making Off Like Lightning

Marcela Kýrová - period photo
Marcela Kýrová - period photo
photo: pametnice

Marcela Kýrová, née Štilipová, was born on November 12, 1944, in Pilsen to Václav Štilip and his wife Marie, née Honomichlová. Kýrová’s grandfather was the renowned businessman Václav Honomichl, who between 1910–1948 ran a garage and small-part manufacture called Autoklinika (“CarClinic”) in Pilsen. When it was nationalized by the communists in 1948, he was evicted and banished from Pilsen. He had no choice but to settle down at a relatives’ home in Bezvěrov. As the granddaughter of a persona-non-grata, Marcela Kýrová was expected not to be able to study at a secondary school. Thanks to the support of the director of the local electro-tech school, she was accepted to the same school in 1958. After her graduation, she became an automation researcher in Skoda Industries. In January 1968, she married Ladislav Kýr, whom she had met in the same department. Following the Warsaw Pact invasion, the Kýrs considered fleeing the country, but eventually decided to stay in Czechoslovakia because of their parents. Two daughters were born in 1970 and 1976 respectively. The Kýrs were being followed by State Security, e.g. during the grandfather’s funeral. State Security also made an unsuccessful attempt to recruit Kýrová as a secret agent during her private trip to West Germany. During the Velvet Revolution in 1989, she was fired from work for her open support of the student strike. In the 1990s, the Kýrs moved to Prague where they had inherited a house. Up until 2021, Marcela Kýrová was working as a secretary at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University.