"We were in danger of that in our country... It was called ayuntamiento. It's when twelve soldiers under some command invade your house. They're instructed to throw all the books out of the bookcases, that they could possibly knock that bookcase down, that they were to search everything possible that was a little suspicious. They started taking the mattresses off the sofas and the beds. And when we asked what they were looking for, they said, 'Blood!' because they got a report that we had given asylum to some wounded Cora official. This was an organization that was involved in land reform. They didn't find any blood, but I was scared stiff, because you can find blood on the bed, on the mattress, on the sheets for many reasons. And especially if you have kids who have bloody knees or something all the time. Then they left and then they came back. That's when they searched the kids' room again. I don't know why. And I put five little books of fairy tales that had been published by Antumalal, which was a publishing house of Unidad Popular, completely in the bottom of a big wicker basket. And that alone would have cost me maybe prison time. Luckily it was so buried, so they basically got bored with it, taking out all the monkeys and stuff and let it go."
"Imagine when he was miserable, and when Carlos asked him what was wrong, he told him that foreign troops had occupied his country and that his wife and children were there. And because Carlos knew what was going on, because the Mapuche felt like they were still occupied by a foreign country, he understood and said, 'Call your family to you. Over there I have a fallow field, over there I have a piece of field. We'll farm it together.' And that almost brought Milan to tears, because that's the absolute most that a Mapuche who jealously guards his pieces of land and pasture could ever offer a foreigner, even a friend."
"The journey from Liběchov to Prague was really memorable. We were travelling by bus and the bus accidentally got into a column of Russian soldiers on the way from Mělník to Prague. Those soldiers were drunk and they were shooting down all the signs that were on the telegraph poles, and at one point this armoured vehicle drove past our bus. They were grinning and pointing at us, pointing their machine guns towards the windows and the driver shouted: 'Everybody under the seats!' And he stepped on gas and took the poor, unfortunate bus out of the convoy. And then they were still shooting after us. So it was a farewell, this scene."
"I was at my grandmother's in Josefov and they were gathering up all the Germans for the train station and there were a lot of them. They were sitting on suitcases and they were completely miserable and my grandmother went to the butcher and bought a half a kilo of sausages and put them in her bag. She went with me to the station and called somebody. A lady came and my grandmother sent her through that fence, those wires, one sausage after another. She gave me one sausage so I wouldn't annoy her, and pushed all the sausages through the fence. So that's the answer, because my grandmother spoke German and she moved around in both of those groups quite naturally. She knew the difference between good people and bad people."
Jaroslava (Jarka) Stuchlíková was born on 23 November 1938 in Zlín. Her father, Stanislav Šulc, was a painter, graphic designer and illustrator working at the Baťa Film Studios in Zlín and later at Barrandov in Prague. As a trick maker in the 1950s, he participated in the film fairy tale The Proud Princess. Her paternal grandmother lived in a village near Dvůr Králové nad Labem after the Second World War. Her mother was a convinced member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, but after her experience with the political trials of the 1950s, she gradually lost her ideals. After the end of the Second World War, the Šulc family moved to Prague. Jarka graduated from the Secondary School of Economics for International Relations, which also focused on foreign languages. After graduation she worked at the Czechoslovak State Airlines and later at the Historical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, where she met her later husband, ethnographer Milan Stuchlík. As part of his research in cultural and social anthropology, Milan made several trips to African countries. During her marriage to Milan, Jarka had a son Petr and a daughter Lída. In the 1960s the family lived in Liběchov. Milan experienced the events of 1968 in Chile, thanks to an exchange stay. There he carried out his field research among the Mapuche Indians. In June of the following year, Jarka and her two children flew to join him. The originally planned one-year stay was extended due to the oncoming normalisation. In Chile, the Stuchlík family experienced a military coup in 1973 and the onset of the Pinochet dictatorship. Several times, as foreigners, they found themselves in immediate danger of their lives. At the turn of 1973 and 1974, after many complications, they returned to Europe. They settled in the UK. Milan was a lecturer at Queen’s University in Belfast until his untimely and unexpected death in December 1980. After his death, Jarka studied Portuguese and Spanish at the same university. For many years she ran a translation and interpreting agency and worked with the BBC. She is the author of a memoir, Indians, Politicians, Colonels (1997), in which she reflects on more than four years spent in Chile. In 2002, she returned permanently to the Czech Republic, where, being encouraged by her friend Věra Št’ovíčková-Heroldová, she began translating books (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Lost City of the Incas, and many others). In 2023 she was living in Prague.
A column called Rehue, a machi healer runs up, drums and heals, Rehue is a "badge" in front of the machi hut, so everyone knows that a healer lives here (smoking, incantations or herbs)
A column called Rehue, a machi healer runs up, drums and heals, Rehue is a "badge" in front of the machi hut, so everyone knows that a healer lives here (smoking, incantations or herbs)
A film crew of the Czech director Jaroslav Šikl in the Mapuche reserve of Coipuco, at Allende's invitation, filmed an agitprop about Chile's road to socialism, resulting in the film Viva Chile (1971)
A film crew of the Czech director Jaroslav Šikl in the Mapuche reserve of Coipuco, at Allende's invitation, filmed an agitprop about Chile's road to socialism, resulting in the film Viva Chile (1971)
A film crew of the Czech director Jaroslav Šikl in the Mapuche reserve of Coipuco, at Allende's invitation, filmed an agitprop about Chile's road to socialism, resulting in the film Viva Chile (1971)
A film crew of the Czech director Jaroslav Šikl in the Mapuche reserve of Coipuco, at Allende's invitation, filmed an agitprop about Chile's road to socialism, resulting in the film Viva Chile (1971)
