Kateřina Zukalová

* 1967

  • “And to this day I don’t know where I got the courage to tell people: ‘Let’s go get him. We won’t just stand here.’ He had not come home from work… And the atmosphere in the society had already been so explosive at that point that people actually believed me and went with me. It wasn’t far from the square to the police station. Straight down the hill and then to the right. We stood in front of the station, I’m guessing several hundred people, maybe two hundred to be precise. And even Havel could not think of such an absurd drama. We stood there and demonstrated for his release. And they released some drunkard. And because those people didn’t know my husband, I ran around with my kid and screamed that it wasn’t him. So that was really funny… Eventually they let him go. It was a small victory and from there it just started rolling on.”

  • “It was resistance against the regime as such. Americans, they were simply a symbol. There were also several graves of fallen U.S. pilots in Moravia. If I should give reasons for my sentiments, it’s that it has always been important to us in Lipník nad Bečvou because Martin Zeberský, a U.S. pilot, would have crashed into the city had he ejected. But he stayed in the plane and died. He has a grave or this memorial in the cemetery in Lipník and us people from Lipník, even as kids when we were going to our grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ graves, we would always go light a candle at Martin’s grave. Up to now, whenever I go there with my children, it’s unthinkable not to go to his grave too. He was a hero or at least he was to us when we were kids, he was the hero we could identify with. We were liberated by the Soviet Union but that was forced on us whereas he was a hero we chose. So in short, it was about this too – identifying with America.”

  • “When dad needed to get home from work without getting arrested, I’d wait by the gate of the company he worked in with my stroller. And before the police turned around, I shoved him the stroller and ran away. And they really never did it – to leave a stroller standing on the road and arrest him. My son was kind of a human shield and they couldn’t do anything about it. We used him like this a couple of times. My son was a warrior back then already.”

  • “I was on my way to school, he needed to go to Prague, so we were standing on the train station in Lipník together. Two officers approached him, both uniformed. It was these patrolmen that we had known. One of them even lived in a street right next to ours. They were unhappy to do such a job but what could they do… And they wanted my dad to come with them, to arrest him. And he had had this phase of passive resistance. He just lay on the floor and said he wouldn’t go anywhere. They of course couldn’t lift him up, so they had to call for reinforcements. It was funny on one hand but on the other hand it wasn’t very pleasant to see your father lying on the ground and the fathers of your classmates all helpless. What should they do with engineer Hradílek, lying on the floor like this… When I tell my kids about these kinds of situations, they don’t believe me.”

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Zlín, 28.01.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 59:25
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

The world was changing and we were a part of it

Picture from 1987, railway station in Trutnov (on the way to a festival)
Picture from 1987, railway station in Trutnov (on the way to a festival)
photo: archiv pamětnice

Kateřina Zukalová, née Hradílková, was born June 29, 1967 in Hranice na Moravě and spent her childhood with her parent and siblings in Lipník nad Bečvou. Her father Tomáš Hradílek, an activist and Charter 77 signatory, was relegated in the 1970s and the family lived under State Security surveillance. Kateřina graduated from a secondary school of agriculture in Lipník nad Bečvou and got married in 1987. Together with her husband they signed the Charter 77 and have taken part in the public affairs in Valašské Meziříčí from November 1989 on. They witnessed the establishment of a local cell of the Civic Forum. She has been a member of the SPUSA Society of Friends of the USA since the Communist times. She currently lives and farms in Valašská Senice. She was the town’s local representative at the time of the interview (2019).