"The Velvet Revolution is the period that probably marked me the most of all historical events in our country, because during the Velvet Revolution I was 21 years old, I was young, I would say a young person, a person of such quite radical views. I was a fourth-year student at the Faculty of Education in Ústí nad Labem. The Velvet Revolution of 17 November 1989 took place on a Friday. I was in college at the time and we always went home for the weekend on Friday afternoons. And now we went back to school on Monday, or actually we went back to the dorm on Sunday evening, and there we started to gather, of course, and discuss the events. There were very prominent personalities in our circle, I would say, these were the guys who had a direct connection to that Prague and they started to set up the so-called strike committees. On Mondays we still normally went to school for lectures, seminars, and from Tuesday onwards a strike committee was formed, of which I was a member. And the strike was called. We were actually on strike until January 1990, so during all that time the events that were really revolutionary - for me, for example, it was an unforgettable Christmas. We weren't interested in fairy tales and Christmas trees, but we watched the news because there was the election of Václav Havel as president of the republic. Now how the Communist Party is going to handle it, now Adamec - the Prime Minister and things like that. These were such incredibly revolutionary things that - I say - for me it was one of the most powerful experiences in my life in terms of politics. Because it changed our lives quite unbelievably."
"My dad was a teacher, he was, among other things, a great admirer of Dubček. And in 1968, at the time of the Prague Spring, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, actually under the influence of the events of the Prague Spring, when the party was being revived in some way, when the slogan 'socialism with a human face' and things like that were being promoted. And my father at that time was very young, he was 22 years old and he was a Russian, he taught Russian, so he spoke Russian very well. And my grandmother, my father's mother, was a cook at that time on the state farm Skalka, under the ruins of the castle and the castle Skalka. Somehow, at the beginning of September, Russian soldiers stopped by that area, and they were really Russians at that time, there was no other nationality. They stopped there and came into the kitchen and asked my grandmother to give them water in jerry cans. Well, my father, who was deeply disappointed by what had happened, in fact, by the violent way in which the revival process of our society in 1968 was ended, started to discuss with those Russian soldiers. If they had any idea what they had done, how they were actually damaging our country, how they were interfering in our affairs and so on. And the Russian soldier, who obviously didn't like it very much, just took a machine gun and pointed it at my dad. My grandmother jumped in front of him at the time and they started to calm him down because he had a family at the time, I was a baby, and he wanted to get into some discussion with them about how what they were doing wasn't exactly clean and fair."
"The year 1968 is actually a very crucial year for me, because I was born in that year. So all my life my younger brother has made fun of me for being such a child of the Depression. And in 1968 I actually have two very strong stories, I would say, from hearsay or from my parents' stories. When we know that the occupation happened on the night of August 20-21. 1968. So my mother at that time, on the morning of August 21, 1968, without basically knowing what had happened, because at that time when television was not yet bringing direct testimonies of the events and there was no internet, so basically they had no idea what had happened, so she walked with me to Třebenice to the pediatrician's office. I was a baby in a pram. And she walked because there was no public transport at that time. So she walked to Třebenice, and there is a bridge in Třebenice when you go from Teplá. And on that bridge she was stopped by Russian soldiers who were already there. And the Russian soldiers threw out her whole pram because they were checking if she was carrying any weapons or something. And she said she just caught me like the baby in the blanket. So she took me out of the stroller and they went through the whole stroller. They found out that she wasn't carrying anything, so then she put me back in the stroller and drove me to the doctor's office."
Ladislava Malíková, née Wilková, was born on 6 May 1968 in Most. She grew up with her parents in the village of Sutom near Třebenice at the foot of the Bohemian Central Highlands. Her father was a teacher and later a school principal. He joined the Communist Party during the Prague Spring, but did not agree with the Soviet occupation in 1968. Ladislava graduated from the grammar school in Lovosice, then from the Faculty of Education in Ústí nad Labem, majoring in Czech language and civic education. In her fourth year at the faculty, she was caught up in the events of the Velvet Revolution, became a member of the strike committee and participated in negotiations with workers in Ústí factories. She graduated in 1991, and in August of the same year she joined the primary school in Velemín, where she has been working ever since (2021).
