Jiřina Hurtová

* 1944

  • "When the demonstrations started in1969, when the memory of Palach started, and when they started to chase them all and arrest them at the time of Palach´s funeral I mean I [...] I mean the Russia that I perceived as a child the one that liberated us and the one we should be grateful to, so it completely changed in 1968 and I started I mean I did not hate them but I was thinking: ‘Would I live to see the day Russians would leave our Republic?’ I was accepting that they started to give commands to us or even my daughter who back then worked as a shop assistant and she told me those Russian wives of Russian soldiers were impudent with shop assistants in the shop. They were choosy, (behaving) as if they were special and expected people to serve them and wanted attention and they were arrogant and treated the shop assistants arrogantly. After it I perceived it (differently), I thought about whether I would live to see them leave our Republic and us not live in subjection. I mean it changed completely at that moment.”

  • "It was 1968, and there was nothing in the shops, even when I was pregnant, I had some nappies left over from the time Ivanka was a baby and some jackets. And there were no ultrasounds at that time, so I went to the maternity hospital and Ládík was born first. And the nurse came to me immediately that she would treat me, she caught me and yelled: ‘Doctor, come back, there is another one!’ So, the doctor came, my second son was born, and I just kept saying: ‘Good Lord, what will I do? What will I do?’ Because I and my husband got married, I moved into an old building, It was 60 years old, but nothing had been fixed. There was no central heating, toilet, or water; the water was only in a laundry room opened with a lever and we wanted to reconstruct the house and needed money. And suddenly, you have two children and buy everything two times! Suddenly, there were such expenses. In the maternity hospital, I was shocked for three days, and I was just saying: ’What will I do, what will I do?’ Eventually, I got a certificate from the maternity hospital that I had twins and with that certificate I went to the department store to get them to sell me extra nappies because the allotment for the baby was, I do not know, twenty nappies, so I needed more nappies. So, I got baby jackets and everything with the certificate because there were no goods.”

  • “He [dad] was genuinely nice and educated for his time. I know that he subscribed to a magazine called Náš chov (Our Breeding) and there he read everything he needed to know about cattle, and he created - it was called a studbook, I mean the cows were noted in a studbook and he bred young bulls and sold them in auctions in Veselí nad Moravou. We brought them there, sometimes also heifers when we had more heifers but mainly bulls. And one cost for example five thousand or four thousand seven hundred and it was really a lot of money at that time. So, because he was such a skilful farmer regarding fruit, cattle and fields and he was considered a really good farmer, well, not just considered, he was a good farmer. And I believe that people from the village respected him the way he deserved.”

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    Vizovice, 29.08.2022

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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I did not believe I would live to see the day when Russians would leave Czechoslovakia

Jiřina Hurtová in 2022
Jiřina Hurtová in 2022
zdroj: Post Bellum

Jiřina Hurtová née Karolová, was born on 19 March 1944 in Zádveřice and she had six sisters. Her parents farmed five hectares of land and remembered the end of the war when the Germans were shelling their house. In the 1950s, the husband of her father´s cousin Jiří Baluška was sentenced to serve four years in the area of Jáchymov based on denunciation. Jiřina studied at an elementary school in Zádveřice and a town school in Vizovice; she graduated in 1958. The same year, communists made her father František Karola join the united agricultural cooperative. He was the last one resisting from the village. Because of her origin, she was not allowed to study, in the end, she was allowed to apply for a newly established two-year school of agriculture in Vizovice. She started working in the accounting department of the united agricultural cooperative in Zádveřice, where she held various positions until her retirement in 1997. In 1966, she got married to Ladislav Hurt and at first, they had a daughter; in the summer of 1968, they had twin sons. She perceived August 1968 just peripherally, but she remembers the roar of the planes that flew into the republic at night. After the Jan Palach´s act, she took against the regime of that time. In November 1989, she and her husband participated in the demonstration in Zlín that also Tomáš Baťa attended. She was really happy that totalitarianism would end. She did not believe she would live to see the day when Soviets would leave Czechoslovakia. She lived in Zádveřice at the time of recording in 2022.