Eva Linhartová

* 1963

  • "We were really such hippies, I used to wear a poncho with colourful fringes from some bedspread my grandmother had made, it ended at my knees, and leather flip-flops and beads and bare legs and a headband on my head and maybe even no shoes. And I didn't have an ID when I moved there, I just had a certificate of loss, and I asked for it at Libina at Public Security. And when we moved, I still had it expired and I was waiting for my ID and I had the certificate expired. And we were coming from České Budějovice one day and there were young boys with dogs on the train and they checked us, and we were still looking like - he had long hair and some kind of headband on his head and no shoes and I didn't have the personal document. So they normally called somewhere, loaded us up and took us somewhere, to some military unit I think, and they put us each in a different cell. That was probably the biggest fear of my life. You're a woman, you're not even nineteen yet, you're sitting alone on this board with a window, and now you don't know if you're lost forever."

  • "We were playing guitar and I had some tambourine and I was singing something and this young guy who looked like he was just a little older than me, a peer, stood in front of me and he said to me in a normal rude way, 'You c...*, shut your mouth and show me your papers,' and I looked at him and spat on his shoes. And that was the biggest mistake I could have made, because a terrible fight broke out, he threw himself at me with a baton and the friend who was with me, Pavel Kocián, jumped on him in front of me, so he caught a tear gas, I was fine, everything stung, and then I was washing his eyes at the hydrant, I remember. In the end, nothing happened to me, I just kept crying, 'Let them go, let them go.' And the boys got into a fight with them, and it started to get dark, and there were some fights with the cops, and the cops withdrew, that was on Saturday night. And on Sunday morning at nine o'clock they got in and they picked up the most hippie people, among them - there were about ten of them - I know there was Bejkr from Přerov, Ota Hůrka and one girl, she had waist-length hair, and they just took them away. And they made such a revenge that they cut all of them, the boys' hair and beards, and just tortured them there. The boys told us that they had stripped them and the skins on their necks, that they allegedly pulled their genitals and so on, and we didn't know what to do, because we had arrived there with the boys from Přerov and they disappeared. And then we were going slowly home and we stayed in Bzenec in a pub somewhere at the railway station and we waited to see if they would turn up, and they turned up around noon. And they looked really pretty beat up and with the cuts on their necks and stuff, and then they told us about it. That was probably the worst experience I've ever had."

  • "Old jeans, a friend's old jean jacket, my dad's checkered shirts and different ones with the buttons just up here, a headband on my head, beads on my arms, safety pins on my pants, and sometimes it happened in that apprenticeship school that I had to take it off. The rosaries we wore, we had to take them off. And once they put me on a podium in the school - the deputy headmaster, because he met me somewhere in the corridor and there was a delegation from grammar school in Uničov, so they were horrified. And then he rushed into our classroom and put a classmate, a friend of mine, who was wearing jeans and some kind of zippered sweater, and next to me, I didn't have a headband on my head, but I had some beads and jeans and a men's shirt, and he put us on the podium and told us that this is what our student should look like, and this is definitely not what they should look like."

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    Olomouc, 29.05.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 02:39:37
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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We were the first homeless people in Šumperk

Eva Linhartová in 2024
Eva Linhartová in 2024
photo: Post Bellum

Eva Linhartová was born on 9 July 1963 in Oskava, Šumperk region. Her parents, Antonie and Jaroslav Linhart, joined the Communist Party after the war. Eva grew up in a safe and picturesque environment. She was an active Pioneer member and led the younger children in Maruška Kudeříková’s club. When she watched the propaganda documentary “Assassination of Culture” at the age of 14, she fell in love with the alternative culture, the underground and the hippie movement. Because they wouldn’t accept her into her dream art school, she had to take up an apprenticeship as a saleswoman. Because of her appearance, she was often the target of ridicule and insults. In 1981, she married Jindřich and together they went to work on the farm in Kyselov in southern Bohemia. After her husband’s attempted suicide, they both returned to the Jeseník region, where nobody wanted to employ them anywhere because of their appearance and reputation as troubled youths. After Eva and Jindřich decided to take legal action, in retaliation the regime had a psychiatric report falsely diagnosing them as schizoid psychopaths and ordered that they not be employed. Henry lost his licence to drive heavy agricultural machinery, which had been his main livelihood until then. They found themselves out of work and living on the streets for a while. After a year, the situation calmed down and Eva and Jindřich were able to join Moravolen in Šumperk - Jindřich only in a menial support position. He could not get his driving licence again until the 1990s. During the years of normalisation, Eva Linhart experienced several harsh border encounters with the armed forces of the communist regime. During the Velvet Revolution she was an active and founding member of the Civic Forum in her native Oskava. In the 1990s, she completed her secondary school studies and got bachelor’s degree in social work - later building a community network of non-profit organizations, of which the Independent Civic Counseling Center in Olomouc was still operating at the time of the interview (2024). In 2024, Eva Linhartová was living in Olomouc.