Miloš Hoznauer

* 1929

  • “In Prague 4 about five hundred metres from my place of residence there was a gymnasium Na Vítězné pláni; the director was my friend, which whom I used to go to skiing courses in the mountains. He accepted me and I started working there. And again, it was interesting, that a comrade from the regional committee of the communist party claimed that there is no normalisation, when comrade Hoznauer teachers in the region‘. And a party threesome was established of comrades Vokoun, Škývara and Hacaperka. And she ordered to get me out of the school yet again. That means they talked to the director, who said: ‚When I accepted him, I shall not throw him out.‘ A party organisation was meant to decide whether I belong to the school, but they were sorry as my deceased wife also taught there and they were sorry for the orphans so didn’t dare, in respect of the deceased, so they went around it. The parent´s association was supposed to raise a protest that their children were taught by an enemy of normalisation. Same as it worked before in case of the professor Záhořová, to write down they didn’t want her in their school. As my wife worked there amongst them, they didn’t accept it this time. Regardless of the fact that within fourteen days comrade Vokoun drowned in a bath of his lover under strange circumstances, the other comrade didn’t survive his first heart attack at quite a young age. And comrade Hacaperka got arrested for economical delicts. All that within fourteen days! And there in the regional office they concluded I got an advocacy at higher instances, so I could finally work peacefully.”

  • “Still at the beginning of 1960s a professor was fired in V Úžlabině, who mentioned the name of Masaryk. The students asked her, as they came across his name in a text and she had to tell them he was the first president of the republic and a really popular one called daddy Masaryk; they wrote it down in their notebooks and a certain parent discovered it and made a big deal of it. And she got immediately kicked out. She could not even take her handbag from her office. They made a search there on her keeping any prohibited literature. Of course she defended herself not wanting to give a falsify history, as Masaryk actually was the first president and sought advocacy at the former minister of education, Nejedlý, who wrote a large monograph on Masaryk. He didn’t meet her in person, but sent her a note via his secretary: ‚I regret that comrade Záhořová chose this very person out of my rich and many works.‘ So finally she was meant to return as the school inspector finally approved her case was a slightly… I don’t even know how to say it, and the professor Záhořová was allowed to return in the end. But the labour unions sent a resolution to the department that they didn’t wish to have such a teacher in their school any more. As an inspector made them write such statement, otherwise the school was to undergo a thorough inspection. So this was still happening in 1960s. So the great 1960s, there were not so many, as it all ended up in 1968. So there were maybe five… or six years of such a hopeful time.”

  • “When I got transferred to the gymnasium Nad Štolou, the director First was there too for a punishment, who was getting in contact with West-German gymnasium in 1960s rather than with an East-German school. So that was an ideological fault and following 1968 he was transferred to the gymnasium and he wanted to get his reputation back and became a real monster. A certain colleague attempted to commit murder for the persecution. So for the first time in my life I became an informer. I went to ask at the regional committee of the communist party, if they knew what kind of a director they got there. Surprisingly they accepted me quite nicely, comrade secretary told me: ‚Well we know comrade First. If today the China people came here, tomorrow he has got slant eyes. But the party needs such people to fulfil its objectives, just temporarily using them to fulfil its goals.‘ That was a lovely formulation, that…”

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    Praha, v bytě pamětníka, 18.02.2017

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But I have to go on

Miloš Hoznauer
Miloš Hoznauer

Miloš Hoznauer was born on 21st September, 1929 in a poor village family. Due to good cadre report a „son of an assistant worker“ could despite minor political incidents finish the secondary school and even study Czech and Russian language at the high school. Yet from his military service he was labelled „renegade“ and „betrayer of working class“. He started teaching, but was often chaning school due to various political scrapes. He tried to lead his students to independent thinking and used unusual forms in his classes. In 1960s he started writing in the Literary newspaper. He critisites ideological rigidity at schools, repeating phrases by students without any thinking, byrocratical educational system. He worked for the Czech television, and was supposed to lead the department of new forms at the ministry of education. Following August 1968 he could not publish anything, but could still teach. All through normalisation he taught about the banned literature, as one of the parents was providing him exile production. Following the velvet revolution the readers asked for him to write the book on Czech literature after 1945. Since 1990s he wrote several textbooks and readers, but also original texts; in 2004 an autobiographical book called Journey into the depths of the teacher´s soul was published; in 2015 a collection of poems called The old man in wait. Now he is preparing the Shipping trunk.