"There were also assistant professors who had some political report and were sent from Prague to Budějovice. There were discussions in the corridors, even instead of lectures or exercises and so on, so you could learn something that you couldn't learn officially - either from a political point of view or from a professional point of view, for example, what is going wrong in agriculture, for example in fertilisation and so on."
"Just a little pearl. There were various teachers, also communist. One day we went into the forest to look for spruce and found their toilet [left by the Russian occupiers]. There were all sorts of letters or newspapers, and as part of the companionship we ended up having to collect the letters and read them instead of the twigs and wood."
- "And what were those letters?"
"They were probably letters that someone had sent them from home, and there were also scraps of newspaper. They used it for hygiene after performing a certain need and we were supposed to collect it. My mother was working on hygiene and when I came home and told her what I was digging in, there was an alarm at home. This was really over the top. Teachers were afraid to say anything at school and that was reflected in 1989. My son was in about third grade and the teacher said she didn't know what to say because she didn't know how it would turn out."
"I remember I was standing there and they were asking me questions and I was saying something. But what I said, I don't remember. Then when I got home, I threw up from the nervous tension because they were deciding whether I would go to my father or my mother after the divorce."
Ing. Jaroslava Vondrková, née Suchá, was born on 11 February 1954 in Prachatice. Her mother Květoslava, nee Filipová, was a nurse, her father worked as an editor of the daily Jihočeská Pravda. Her parents’ marriage was divorced in 1960. Jaroslava Vondrková’s grandfather Josef Filip was on the Russian front during the First World War, where he defected and joined the Czechoslovak legions. This family experience carried over into the period when the Legionnaires fell out of favor under the Communist regime. According to the witness’s account, her father sued for her after the divorce, arguing precisely because of the “faulty” legionary past of her mother’s family. The daughter was eventually able to stay with her mother, thanks to the intervention of her uncle, who had served in the army and thus had a favourable personnel report. Jaroslava spent her childhood in Netolice, where she also experienced, for example, the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops. In 1969-1973 she studied at the grammar school in Prachatice, then graduated in economics at the Faculty of Agriculture in České Budějovice. In the 1970s and 1980s, she lived mainly a family life, she and her husband raised four children. She also worked in charity. In 2023 she lived in Vlachovo Březí.
