Lýdia Mamulová

* 1952

  • "So we had my first state election there, too. We didn't go to the elections and we were at home and there was music playing all the time, what they call it, just building music in Zruč nad Sázavou, a small town, right. And then suddenly the phone rings at about two o'clock: 'You haven't been to the polls yet, so you should come, so that you can vote.´ I said: 'Well, we're not going to vote.´ They said: 'Well, you don't have to come, we'll come to you with the ballot box!´ That's what I said, that we don't want to vote. And I talked to the lady for a while about not going to the polls, and she tried to persuade us to go. So I said we're really not going, so she hung up the phone. And a minute later, the music went off. The election was over."

  • "Well, we had 22 students sign it. And when the faculty found out about it, they were angry with us and Dean Molnár said that it was absolutely stupid what we were doing, that it couldn't be done like that. And he wasn't at all like for the communists, yeah, but that's just how we know how it all was. But anyway, he just scolded us for it, we were told that we should have submitted it through the regular way through the faculty, right, which Franta said would have gotten nowhere, they would have just caught it and it wouldn't have gone anywhere."

  • "Well, so I was in my first summer job, and I was in my first summer job in '68. We were in Aloisov and we were there when the Soviet troops came." - "Somewhere in the Jeseníky Mountains was this Aloisov?" - "In Jeseníky. And we were going. I had to change trains about four times from Bratislava, by train to Brno, then to Hanusovice and up there. So I came to the summer job. It was supposed to be in Branna, which is a small cabin in the forest with electricity, and because there were about 26 of us, we were in Aloisov, which was a cabin in the forest right there, just a cabin where there was no electricity. And at that time we were headed by Tomas Bisek, he and his wife were there, they had some children already, I think. And there was a plethora of all the theologians, so there were, I don't know who all was there at that time - like Bob Vaštecky, I can't remember all of it, but Dan Drápal was there too - just like a lot of theologians. And so it was in August and we went to work in the morning and we had to go over the hill because we were logged into this Branna, so we were in the Branna forest and not Aloisov, so we walked an hour and a half to work. We got there, we sat down on the logs and now all of a sudden there was a commotion that, well, the Russians are here. Hajnej just that so planes Russian and tanks, that just it's on the border."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 26.10.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 02:09:43
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 2

    Praha, 25.01.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 03:12:31
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

The most important thing is to be faithful to truth, love and justice

Lydia Mamulová, 1970
Lydia Mamulová, 1970
photo: Archive of the witness

Lýdia Matulová, née Prudilová, was born on 4 March 1952 in Bratislava to Vlastimil and Rudolf Prudil. Her father came from an evangelical background, her mother from a Catholic one. They raised their children in the evangelical spirit. They attended various communities in Bratislava - Reformed Church, Baptists and Methodists. In 1970, Lýdia Mamulová graduated and began her studies at the Comenius Evangelical Divinity School in Prague. In 1974, she was one of twenty-two students who signed a petition condemning the withdrawal of state approval from pastors Alfred Kocáb and Jakub S. Trojan. She did not complete her studies for personal reasons. In the following years the Mamuls changed several places of work - they lived in Žďár nad Sázavou, Hvozdnice and then in Chodov near Karlovy Vary. Before the Velvet Revolution, she began working as a deaconess in Sokolov. Until 1997 they lived in Daňkovice in the Highlands. Then she worked in a congregation in Radotín, Prague. In 2003, she became a senior member of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren, making her the first woman to hold this position. Until 2018 she worked as a parish priest at the Church of St. Salvator in Prague’s Old Town. She and her husband raised three children. In 2023, she was living in Prague.