Ing. Jiří Nor

„After the war, I too felt the atmosphere of freedom, the enthusiasm of the nation that it was possible again to build and go foward now that the Nazi opression was gone. And I also remember how then, after the Communist coup in February 1948, the mood of the people and their optimism were gradually changing until eventually they succumbed to nihilism. The feelings of hopelessness didn´t arrive immediately. In 1948, 1949 people were saying „This is nonsense. This can´t last. It´ll collapse in 1950, it´ll collapse in ´52, then in ´53. It took some time before the nation got used to the fact that the dictatorship was here to stay. My father was in the Syndicate of Writers which was dissolved already in February. In his Memoirs, he describes the scene of the Presidium session as it was raided by a group calling itself Action Committee (Akční výbor) that demanded everybody to leave the room. Mr Drda, Mr Řezáč and I don´t recall the names of the others – they got a nickname the drdo-řezáč clique – they later dissolved the Syndicate of Czechoslovak Writers which had some 550 members and formed their own Union of Czechoslovak Writers wirh 123 members. That means that 75% of the writers were thrown overboard. My father was, naturally, among those. He was even more persecuted being at the time the Secretary of the Syndicate, in fact its Spokesperson. The President was, if I´m not mistaken, Karel Scheinpflug, that I knew from what my father told me and also later from his Memoirs. So, the period after the 1948 was, for many people the question of how to survive those few years until the inhuman regime collapses.

„It was my pleasure to take the maturita exams in Maths, Physics and Czech. I was good at all these subjects but was taken by surprise by the Russian question. I drew as the topic the book Mladá garda – Molodaja gvardija. This book was on the list of compulsory reading. I had gone through all the grades – The Badge of Fučík (named after the Czech writer, the victim of the Nazi terror, and a national hero of the time – note of MČ), etc. without ever having this book in my hands. And now I was given a short piece of the text and was asked to speak about the book. I was saved by the Russian secondary school (where I had studied earlier) as I was able to speak in fluent Russian about absolutely nothing, which kept other members of the examining jury in a kind of semi-asleep state. The Russian teacher, I have to say, co-operated. She understood that I didn´t know anything about the subject.The only name I remembered, and still remember today, was Oleg Koshevoj so I said „vychodil odin malčik“ and kept speaking. After a few minutes of this blubbering nonsense, she looked at the jury and said „This is great. Very good.“ This was how I passed my maturita exam with a top mark also in Russian.“