Around ten o'clock my daughter, then 16-17 years old, came from the kitchen, where she was listening to Radio Free Europe, as she was used to in our household and was no longer disturbed at that time, and she said: "A student was killed in Prague." The day before. But it's like an unimaginable time shift that we only found out about it on the 18th (November 1989) through Radio Free Europe. And this news, which eventually turned out to be false, was like a fuse that was thrown into that powder keg. And then the topic of the debate changed completely. Of course, it was still something to do, but somehow more concrete. It was shocking news. What to do immediately. Well, I admit that we didn't come up with much that was so commendable, except that we would meet in front of the Polish Center the next day - it was Saturday, so we would meet there on Sunday at five and light candles. We didn't have any other information, so what about any organization. And then we parted ways, but the next day, Sunday, we got phone calls and he called me specifically from the faculty. Well, a literary critic I know, but now I've lost his name again.
- Zajac
How? No, no, it wasn't Peter Zajac. He was like ... it's embarrassing, but I can't remember the name now. From the Department of Slovak Literature. That: "Come to the Umelka this afternoon for an exhibition, that there will be an interesting exhibition there." He didn't say either, but I say: "You know, I have a different program at five." He says: "But it will be very important, very interesting." And then I understood that it was not an exhibition, that it was something else. And so, in fact, the phone calls from people were like they were called to the Artist's House. I remember - only Laco Kováč somehow did not receive the information and was the only one at the Polish Center to light the candle while we were already in the Artist's House. And then the civil movement Public Against Violence was actually formed there. And it was a coincidence that most of the leadership of the future VPN was actually at that meeting with me.
And actually, the result of our activity was the letter of the 14th sociologists. Well, that was actually at the end of the summer or the beginning of September… that was, wait, September ’89. When we stood up as if in support of the Bratislava Five and wrote a letter to President Husák requesting their release, but we also attached a short analysis of what needs to be done to really bring about peaceful development in Slovakia.
- Did it have any reaction?
Yes, it had a reaction. I would say stronger than several statements by dissidents, because it was like a bigger signal to the leadership of the Communist Party that there was dissatisfaction when it was a statement in which, out of the fourteen, there were, I think, eight party members from various academic institutions. So, of course, it was presented on Free Europe, and Miroslav Kusý took care of that. And at the same time, it was also the subject of my second visit to Februárka.
The three of us were actually doctoral students – I will use the current designation – of Associate Professor Hirner. We were also called Hirner's students, which for some was both a positive label, but for some, on the contrary, an ideologically condemning label, saying that we wanted to do pure science, that we did not want to express ourselves ideologically. So we were faced with a kind of, I can say it now, Sofia's choice, that if you want to continue your academic career in sociology, you need to join the Communist Party. This supervisor of ours… my first reaction was that never. Never. Something like that. Moreover, my mother, which was interesting, she and my father were members of the Communist Party, as I said. My father was a resistance fighter during the uprising and my mother in 1947, so she was also not a conjuncture member, but they somehow believed, they naively believed, they had no education to show them what was really behind it. She told me that only over my corpse. That you won't enter there. She said so. Then our strongest authority, Associate Professor Hirner, with his history as a prisoner of the communist regime, told us: "You know, I would really like you to be here, so that you could develop sociology as new cadres and a young generation. I wouldn't like to..." Because he actually experienced the first liquidation of sociology, when sociology as a scientific discipline really became bourgeois nonsense and disappeared from universities and everyone was shut down. That was a trauma for him and then, starting in the 1970s, in normalization, another form of liquidation that was no longer so existential was actually being prepared. So he says: "You know, how it is necessary that decent people be there too." And that was a certain way of being manipulative from him. He didn't say change the system. He was too good a sociologist to know that. But he knew that on a small scale, on a micro level, we could still play a role.
I had a fulfilling, meaningful life and I always look for inspiration in people who have gone through more difficult times, when conditions were even worse, and who lived positively.
Soňa Szomolányi was born on December 5, 1946 in Spišská Sobota. Her father, Samuel Repta, came from three brothers, all three of whom were affiliated with the Slovak National Party. Štefan was captured by the Gestapo for anti-state activities and died during transport to Auschwitz, her father was a liaison officer during his treatment in Vyšné Hágy, and her brother Ján founded the Second Czechoslovak Partisan Brigade of M. R. Štefánik together with Viliam Žingor. After the war, her father married and the young couple moved to Vyšné Hágy, where he worked as an administrator of a medical institution. When Soňa was five years old, they moved to Nový Smokovec, and her father worked as a secretary at the National Committee. After graduating in 1965, Soňa decided to study at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, but after a year she changed her major to sociology. In the summer of 1968, she was in Great Britain for the second time, and after the events in Czechoslovakia, the British government offered them the opportunity to study at City, University London. She returned to Czechoslovakia in 1969 and graduated in 1971. She agreed to join the party for the sake of her postgraduate studies. In 1972, she married her husband Ján and their daughter Jana was born. At the end of the summer of 1989, she drafted the List of 14 Sociologists, with M. Bútor and V. Krivý, in which they stood up in defense of the Bratislava Five. She was subsequently interviewed on Februárka. In November 1989, she was at the birth of the Public Against Violence and was elected to parliament in the first democratic elections, but she gave up her mandate, but worked as an advisor to Deputy Prime Minister Porubiak. After leaving the Department of Sociology at Comenius University, she founded the Institute of Central European Studies with Radičová and Krivý, and worked there until 1994, when she took a job at the Institute of Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and the Department of Political Science at Comenius University, where she was the head for ten years and continues to lecture there to this day. In 2016, Soňa received the Order of Ľudovít Štúr from the President.
