“Back then, there were no job vacancies. There were no doctors at all in North Bohemia. And in other places there were no job vacancies for doctors. When we finished medical school, they told us that we had to find a job and gave us a document saying we were entitled to it. The number of vacancies for doctors was the same as the number of graduates. But it was your struggle where you got the job. Whoever was favoured and was not from Prague got a job in Prague. Whoever was not favoured, went where the jobs were. I and my schoolmates travelled through the Vysočina Region and South and West Bohemia. All the jobs were taken. When the time was about to end and I had to have a job, a friend told me to go to work in Litoměřice because it was close to Prague. That we would stay there for some time and return to Prague. I got to know that it was forbidden to hire doctors from the North of Bohemia in other places in the Republic. People could get somewhere else only when they got married, for example by faking it. A man who worked with us the chief of neurology had been arrested for drug trafficking from a Western foreign country. They shortened his sentence to half when he signed to go to North Bohemia.”
“Inversion was here mainly in winter and in autumn and you could not see the Sun for example for six weeks. It was foggy, the cars were driving slowly, you could not see anything and there was a heavy smog of sulphur everywhere. Allergies were on the rise, it was horrible. Yellow flags flew on public transport vehicles when the air was heavily polluted, people were not allowed to exercise outside, children were not allowed to go outside. What was happening, was already leaking out to common society. And people felt healthy anger. And it was a way how to approach the grey core, people around dissidents. People who were not associated with them. At that time, we were invited to come to the public health authority in Litoměřice, so that they would respond us to our recorded delivery. I had a child with me, Ondra and I think that I was already pregnant with Anča. Ondra ran away from me because he was bored there. He escaped out into a room that led to other rooms. And as I ran to get him, I saw that there was someone in the next room recording us on a tape recorder. I remember that I was pulling up Ondra's pants, which were falling down, while I was looking at the guy.”
“Back then, my husband was friends with Petr Pospíchal who was in touch with Polish dissidents. They had a proven path through Rudohoří. The place where we handed the books was regularly changed. We went to the borders to receive them and the Poles brought them there. I and my sisters had the same backpacks. They were scarce at that time, because they were hard to get as everything else during the Communist regime. We would always take a backpack to Poland where we filled it and then I, Petr and my husband went to the borders and we switched the backpacks there and were able to leave immediately in case something happened. We simply climbed the ridges, switched the backpacks there and moreover we talked and it was really nice. However, once when I was already pregnant, we drove a Trabant, we had borrowed a red estate Trabant. We got there and they left me at the bottom (of the ridges), I was pregnant so I did not climb the ridges with them. Suddenly, Honza came running towards me and told me that we had to go away quickly. He told me that Petr ran the other way and we had to get out of there fast. We thought that they would be waiting for us on the way to the Czech Republic, so we drove to Slovakia and then took a different road back so we would not get caught. Honza then told me that someone must have given away the place. That they were there in a clearing talking to each other and then they were raided. They managed to escape to a forest and each of them ran another way. And Petr was then arrested, I mean Petr Pospíchal, and I think that he was imprisoned for three years because of it.”
“Martička and grandfather went to the village to get some rolls and milk in the morning. They returned and said that we were occupied. And I heard it and said to myself: ‘Occupied?‘ I had a healthy base; in my family, they always told us the truth about what was going on. So I asked them if the Germans occupied us. They answered that the Russians and it was a huge surprise for me that someone who we were told at school was our friend, attacked us. We went to the village to watch TV, to watch the news. It was horrible for me to see (on TV) tanks driving around there. I felt threatened because we knew the war films, we were fed with them at that time. And I saw it there at that moment. My mother worked in the district or in the hospital, she went to the ambulance service and spent fourteen days in the emergency medical service. She would go to work and after work she would drive the ambulance around town where there were shootings. We were really afraid that something would happen to her.”
Irena Moudrá Wünschová was born on 20 December 1957 in Karlovy Vary. She grew up in Jáchymov and Prague in the family of a doctor Helena Machová, née Pavlíková. Her father Alexander Mach was a political prisoner in the 1950s. After his release, he worked for some time in the uranium mines in Jáchymov as a civilian employee. The family moved to Prague in 1966. The witness spent part of her childhood at her grandparents´ in Klatovy. As a doctor, her mother was in touch with dissidents. Having finished grammar school, Irena started to study Medicine at Charles University in Prague and she graduated from it in 1983. She then started to work in Litoměřice in the North of Bohemia. She got married to dissident Jan Wünsch in 1988 and they had three children Ondřej, Anna and Zuzana. At the end of the 1980s, they tried to end the isolation of dissidents through ecological activities, they co-founded an organization Zelený kruh (Green Circle Organization). She participated in smuggling Samizdat literature from Poland to Czechoslovakia. She joined the Green Party in 2007 and became its deputy chairwoman in 2016. In 2021, she was a doctor at the inpatient palliative care unit of the Masaryk Regional Hospital in Ústí nad Labem. She also worked for the St. Stephen’s Hospice in Litoměřice. She was a member of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren in Ústí, she lives in Ústí nad Labem. The story of the witness could be recorded thanks to financial support from the Ústí nad Labem Region Fund.
