"And I have to say that the period immediately after I came back from Britain was probably the worst for me. Because the normalisation in the early seventies, that was really terrible. For somebody who had a whiff of something different, there were more of us like that, those people who came back, and I know how terribly frustrated we were about it. Then in '72 I was teaching some course at a research institute and they asked me if I wanted to teach a language course. And I accepted, which was probably quite a good idea, because I managed to employ the aforementioned Franta Fröhlich for very little money, who taught English there with me, then Franta Černý, who was later our ambassador to Germany, taught there, and a certain Alenka Vrbová, who was also fired. I actually didn't get my contract renewed for political reasons, as they said, while the others were all fired a year later: Franta Fröhlich, Šebesťáková, all these people. Well, I stayed at the research institute until '89. I was somewhat hidden there. I was in charge of language teaching, and I also translated there, which came in handy many times later, because I translated technical things."
"That was the time, I remember when someone brought in an English magazine or newspaper, for example, it was hand-to-hand. We used to borrow it. Time, which today I probably wouldn't read at all because I'm not interested in it, so in those days I remember it was all battered, the corners were bent. Everybody was reading it, simply because they felt like they had some crazy rarity. Then, later on, somebody brought something here and there when they came from abroad. I mean foreigners when they went to Prague. But it was always dangerous. If they had found those books with them, they wouldn’t have brought them back. But as I said, that was in the early 1960s. Then things started to shift a bit, and I actually have memories of university that the time wasn’t as frozen as it seemed; after all, we already had some contact with the West. And as it got closer to the Prague Spring, I then interpreted during the Prague Spring for a British television channel, and by then, one had the feeling of an open world."
"And when I finished high school in '64, I went to the University of 17 November to study translation and interpreting, which was due to the fact that a Mrs Vogler, who lived in England before the war, lived in our house on the third floor, where I live. She was an English teacher, she had beautiful English, beautiful pronunciation, she was very strict, and she, because the marriage was childless, so she sort of adopted me in the sense that I walked her dog or she walked her dog and I walked with them. She started teaching me, when I was very young, different nursery rhymes. Then I started going to her for English classes regularly and I think that gave me a pretty good foundation. She then decided to help me continue that professionally, so she prepared me for the November 17 exams, which I got into in '64. I had it in combination with Russian, because at that time you could study with a Western language either Russian or German, because there was the GDR, so German was another option. But I was doing English/Russian at the time."
Jana Rejšková, née Reiter, was born on 19 May 1946 into a family marked by the Holocaust. She grew up in the centre of Prague, and many of her classmates at primary school and grammar school in Karlín had a similar story. From childhood, she had a great English teacher and under her guidance Jana achieved results incomparable to the Czechoslovak standard of the time. She excelled and easily graduated in Russian and English translation/interpreting from the University of 17 November in Prague. In 1968 she managed to travel to Switzerland and then to Great Britain, but returned to Prague a year later to teach at the same university. Due to the political purges, her contract was not extended, leaving her without a job, and she struggled through the early years of the so-called normalization. After some time, she was offered a position to teach English at the Prague Research Institute for Engineering Technology and Economics, where she remained in the background until the Velvet Revolution. In the new political climate, she briefly worked in an administrative position for the Czechoslovak government, and it was then that she began to focus more intensely on interpretation. Her experience was fully utilized after she was accepted to the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, in the Department of Translation and Interpreting. From that point on, she dedicated herself to teaching the next generation of interpreters. She became a sought-after interpreter for the European Parliament, for international meetings of prominent politicians both at home and abroad, at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, for the American Cultural Center, and so on—the list would be long.
Jewish cemetery, grave of great-grandmother Kateřina and great-grandfather Josef Ullmann, first from the right, Kamýk nad Vltavou. Katerina died in November 1941 and is the last person buried in this cemetery
Jewish cemetery, grave of great-grandmother Kateřina and great-grandfather Josef Ullmann, first from the right, Kamýk nad Vltavou. Katerina died in November 1941 and is the last person buried in this cemetery
The wedding of Milka and Ota Reiter’s parents, with Grandma Marie to the left of the mother, Grandma Irma Reiterová to the right of the father, and the mother’s brothers Ota and Jirka behind the engaged couple. Prague, November 10, 1940
The wedding of Milka and Ota Reiter’s parents, with Grandma Marie to the left of the mother, Grandma Irma Reiterová to the right of the father, and the mother’s brothers Ota and Jirka behind the engaged couple. Prague, November 10, 1940
