"After the communist coup, they only picked out four hundred who were communists, and those were the artists. The rest of us were given 'artists by profession' cards. That meant we had no right to anything at all. We only had the right to be freelance and not to have a job. Because everybody had to be employed, otherwise he was a freeloader and they locked him up. We were like the last capitalists. We could freelance, we didn't have to have an employer, but we weren't allowed to work. We couldn't buy painting materials like the four hundred recognized painters."
"Dad took pictures of the Soviets. He took a lot of photographs. They didn't have cameras, that didn't exist with them. And he went there to the military doctor and asked him for the address, that he would send them all this. And he [the military doctor] had the courage to say, 'I can't give it to you because we won't have the address. They're going to send us all to Siberia.' Dad couldn't understand what was going on at all because we weren't informed. He [the military doctor] probably had the need to pass it on as an intelligent person, or maybe to warn. That's kind of how I imagined it."
"Even then, some infiltration of the communist drive had already begun. It seems too early, but I think it was also reflected in everyday life. Like my parents, even though my dad was the founder of scouting and they both loved nature, they started to be influenced by that leftist drive. They started receiving promotional material from Russia, even back then. I recognized it in one thing. They left the church. The tendency of the people who were the intelligentsia at that time was that they began to be ashamed of the obscurantism of life in the church. They saw it as progressive to join other tendencies. I went to primary school and it was normal then that religion classes were voluntary. My parents didn't put me there. This may be a thing that someone may not have said. Suddenly something came along that was completely absurd. It was made up by somebody, I don't know who, but it must have been leftists. It was a formation class for those who wouldn't go to religion. It was called something terribly ridiculous - secular morality."
Eva Pospíšil-Hanušová was born on 5 October 1930 in Prague. Her parents had already embraced communist ideas before the Second World War. After the war, she received a sewing certificate from a school for women’s professions. Between 1948 and 1953 she studied monumental painting with Emil Filla at the University of Applied Arts (UMPRUM). Because she was not a member of the Communist Party, she had to work as a freelancer and had difficult access to art supplies. In 1955, her son Jan was born. In 1963 she met Josef Pospíšil and they began a relationship. After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, Josef Pospíšil, as a former political prisoner, emigrated to Switzerland, where Eva Pospíšil-Hanušová followed him six months later. Her son stayed in Czechoslovakia with his grandparents and did not see his mother for 13 years. Eva Pospíšil-Hanušová married Josef Pospíšil in Switzerland and they settled in Biel. They worked and exhibited together until her husband’s death in 2008. In 2023, Eva Pospíšil-Hanušová was living in Biel, Switzerland.
