"I would never want it to go back to before 1989. I would never want to live through it again. And I can only regret that I lived a large part of my life when one was young in that prison, in that world of ours. It bothers me when someone defends it, how wonderful it was. Well, we did, didn't we. We bought bread in the queue, and meat, and we could go to the Balaton. If you had friends, you could go to Bulgaria over there. But I wouldn't want that. Democracy, for me, despite its faults and despite the fact that we are simply human beings, is by far the best that humanity has been able to invent so far."
"It was an amazing euphoria. My older son was in high school and I was alone with the boys. They helped at home too, because I spent time at the Civic Forum or in the improvised editorial office. It was such an intense time when there was really not much sleeping, eating, everything in hurry. There was always something going on somewhere, some other news, people..."
"I also had folk singers in my rank [at the district cultural centre] at that time. We had booked [Pavel] Dobeš. They booked him through an agency, secured the hall. Dobeš was to perform. People came in blocks to the concert and Dobeš was standing there, he wanted to talk to people and explain to them that he wasn't going to sing because he was on strike. Then the director arrived, he was green and played all the colours, and he dispersed it, saying that it was an unauthorised assembly. So there was even more of an argument. Then Dobeš said he wasn't going to stir things up and left. Some people were cheering for him, others were furious that they had paid the entrance fee."
"It was not hidden at all, the secret [State Security members] went to church. We used to go to Františkovy Lázně. However, there were secret ones everywhere. He even went... I can't remember the name of the gentleman. They said, hey, he's always standing there making commas. And he's interested in intellectuals. He's not interested in grandmothers, ordinary women, he's interested in teachers, doctors, journalists. So they're there making lines and they've got us mapped out. We thought we were secret, but I guess we weren't that secret. So they invited me to the district party committee and I quit. They told me that I just didn't meet the requirements for a socialist journalist. And I still had a cross around my neck, so they said, "Do I know what that means? I said I knew what it meant. So they fired me. They literally fired me. I was alone back then with two boys; my husband had already left. That was in 1986."
"The Hraničář was a district newspaper that was run by the ONV (Distric NAtional Committee). The founder was the District National Committee, but ideologically it fell under the district party committee. There we really experienced what censorship was, how to write what to write about and why not to write about this and that. I had one humorous story, if it's not boring. I was young, I stayed there by myself because I was working on something, my colleagues broke up after some reports. And it was the centenary of the town of Aš. So it was a kind of a cross-section of the history of the city and its founding. Until we came to the fact that, I think in 1961, the district of Aš was abolished. It was abolished. Well, because there was space left at the end, we put a picture there. The cactus growers of Aš were doing an exhibition for the centenary of Aš, an exhibition of cacti. So we included a photo. The newspaper came out, we were preparing another one. And now the door flew open and Mr. Inocenc Šarman burst into the editorial office. Inocenc Sharman was the dreaded Secretary for Ideology at the Communist Party of the Czechoslovak Republic. And he was really such a red brain. He was very feared. He was like, "Where is Kubišta?! I don't know, he went there and there.' So he started yelling at me. He needed to cool his throat, I was there, so he started yelling at me that he had seen through us, that we were a counter-revolutionary nest, that he was going to crush us because he understood our secret, that we were going to say that the communists had destroyed everything in Aš, and now there was only a desert where cacti were growing. That he understood what we meant. So I know I was freaked out. And then they invited the editor on the carpet and gave him a good bath. I have this memory of that ideology."
Jaroslava Rymešová was born as a daughter of Jaroslav and Milada Svobodovi on October 10, 1950 in Trutnov. Her father taught at a special school, her mother worked as a nursery manager. After her mother’s untimely death in 1964, she moved with her father to Aš, where he became the director of a children’s home for boys. She graduated from the secondary industrial school in Aš and after graduation she joined the laboratory of the local spinning mill Tosta. She started to contribute to the company magazine Stávek and in 1972 she was offered to become editor of the regional newspaper of the Cheb district Hraničář. She wrote reports from local factories and agricultural cooperatives, yet she faced daily censorship interference from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In the 1970s she studied journalism by distance learning, married, had two sons (1973 and 1976) and in 1977 moved with her husband from Aš to Cheb. In 1981 she met Růžena Jírová from the local Cultural and Social Centre, who led her to the Christian faith. She began to visit Pater František Radkovský in Františkovy Lázně and to participate in meetings of the Fokoláre movement. In 1984 she visited a relative in West Germany, after which she was interrogated by State Security and listed as a candidate for secret cooperation. She never accepted the offer of cooperation with State Security. In 1986, she lost her job at the newspaper because of her faith and began working at the Cultural and Social Centre. In November 1989, she attended the canonization of Agnes of Bohemia in Rome with Father Radkovsky and then became involved in the events of the November 1989 days in Cheb. In 1990, she returned to the editorial office of the local newspaper, which was now published under the name Chebsko, and was also a local correspondent for Radio Free Europe. Around 2000, she left the media and worked as a Roma advisor in the social department of the municipal office. She also teaches creative writing.
