Mgr. Olga Mandová

* 1962

  • “My parents decided to take a fast train and to travel from Žilina to Prague. The train, however, did not even reach the main station. It stopped at one of the stations in the suburbia. And I remember walking down the long streets at night. I did not know what way to go. In Vršovice, a lady opened a window and called on my parents that they were mad, that they couldn’t go with a child to the city centre and she urged us to sleep in her flat. I fell asleep, I didn’t know what was going on. It was a house with a cock in its coat-of-arms, it still stands there. I could not even thank to that family and I don’t know whether they still live there… The next day when we woke up, we walked outside. The weather was beautiful and there was silence. There was a terrible silence. I experience this terrible silence only once in my life… when Václav Havel died and the procession went to the Castle, the whole city was silent.”

  • “Besides that we studied, some of us applied for courses of the Prague Information Service. I was much interested, I studied Russian and history at the Faculty of Arts, so to serve as a guide in Prague was a dream come true for me. I took all the courses and thought, I do not have to study the history, suffice to know all the sights, where they are located and their particular history. I prepared myself for this. I sat an exam and was asked about WWII. I started by talking about the invasion of Poland, from both sides. The commission went stone-faced. They were absolutely shocked by what I had said. I went on for a while. Then I realised that this is really something that cannot be found in any textbook and withdrew from the exam. One of the ladies on the commission approached me later and said, ‘You did well to withdraw, as we would have to report all of this to university and you would have been expelled.’”

  • “I, a Russian teacher, and my colleague specialising civic education, we led the strike committee. It was quite absurd. We attended the demonstrations. What needed to be transcribed, was transcribed by early morning. My colleague dictated to me and I typed it down and it was disseminated in the morning. We took active part in all of these days. I am proud that the students of that apprentice school went, I can’t remember now what of these days it was,… and I told them, ‘Take the flag’. They took the flag, walked down the Vinohradská Street and the flag was flown on the Czech Radio building. I am very proud of this, as I told myself, ‘Yes, this is right’. I, we gave something to the students, they went and handed over the flag.”

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    Praha, 30.07.2018

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Mandová Olga 2018
Mandová Olga 2018
photo: natáčení ED 2018

Olga Mandová was born on December 11, 1962, in Prague. Her father grew up in Slovakia and her mother, originally from a family of Volyhnia Czechs, lived from her childhood in Kyiv and moved to Czechoslovakia with her family after WWII. She grew up in a varied environment, linguistically and culturally. Often, as a little girl, she listened to stories told by her family’s visitors in Russian and Ukrainian. The dramatic stories of people she heard about formed the basis of her future anticommunist stance. She took interest in political situation as early as secondary school. Gradually she learned that it was possible to speak openly only in a close circle of friends, trustworthy people, else trouble awaited. She was careless a few times and only luck and resourcefulness saved her from being expelled from university. She graduated in 1987 of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, specialising in history and Russian. She made a number of trips to the Soviet Union and, thanks to her friends in Munich, also to the West. Thus she acquired good knowledge about the current social and economic condition. She felt a need to disseminate the information on the true state of things. She continued in her university activities by copying literature which further spread by samizdat. She worked as a Russian teacher. At the moment, she engages in activities of the Ukrainian minority in the Czech Republic, she is the leader of St Vladimir Choir and works as a teacher.