Marie Jónová

* 1959

  • "I had to terminate it somehow, because I actually went on to study and I took up complementary secondary study of economics. That was arranged by my mother's friend, Dr. Tesař. He sent a message to me through my mother, who then was dealing with it, probably spoke about it somewhere, to stay there, that they had no right to do that. I knew that after a legal battle I could probably stay there somehow, but I did not have any support there. That was what I missed. My stomach ached every time I went in there, and I kept thinking, 'How is this going to turn out?' I was getting sick of it, in that building. In short, the conditions were such that I didn't feel anywhere near free and free enough to study nicely. So that it would make sense for me. The meaningfulness was completely gone. That was February. Then in February, I went to the Secondary School of Economics in Spojenců Street and finished my complementary study there."

  • "My mother worked at Pofis at the time, and the grammar school headmaster [Kolčava] was a philatelist and used to go there. He then came to share with her the information that they had received a letter from the faculty, basically a a sort of rebuke. Don't let it happen again, that they had let someone with religious beliefs like mine slip through to the faculty to the teaching course. That this offically can't happen, so they should watch out for that. And that's what my class teacher, whom I later met, told me, and that's what headmaster Kolčava told my mother. They got the rebuke, it had to be read out at a meeting, that everybody should learn a lesson from it, that the references should be written honestly and properly."

  • "I was nineteen years old, and I didn´t have what it takes for such debates with them from the legal point of view. So I came there well-behaved, to make the problem as small as possible. And that time I was really there until it was night. It was completely pitch black when they let me go. I actually don't even know what I said to them there. Because they laughed at me afterwards, they said, 'We're not even going to write down your gibberish.' So I didn't even sign anything. For two days I was being grilled, I just knew I couldn't say any names. I made one mistake in the interrogation. When I got there, right at the beginning, they had it pretty well prepared. 'So I guess you know why you're here?' And I was just looking for a few minutes, and then to say something, I just shrugged my shoulders, 'I guess I know.' And they just caught up on it, 'So you know you've done something.' That's how they turned it around. And basically half a day of conversation revolved around that, that I was doing something that I knew I shouldn't be doing. And that's how they were making me uncertain. The interrogation was classic, switching a good guy and a bad guy, just like it was in the Kolya film. I remember that, but other than that, really that first day, that first part of the questioning, they just kept involving me in a kind of self-reflection to put me in a kind of perpetrator position so that they could start pressing me."

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    Olomouc, 20.06.2023

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We‘re not even going to write down your gibberish. That was their style

Marie Jónová in 2023
Marie Jónová in 2023
zdroj: Post Bellum

Marie Jónová, née Lukešová, was born on 23 January 1959 in Vítkov. She was the second oldest of five children. When she was six, her father died tragically and the family moved to Olomouc. Her mother raised her children in the Catholic faith. Marie Jónová, like all her siblings, attended religious classes at primary school and grammar school. This meant a significant limitation in the choice of further studies. Nevertheless, by coincidence, due to not mentioning religion in her references, the witness was admitted to the Faculty of Science of Palacký University in Olomouc, teaching course. After graduating from secondary school, in the summer of 1978, she took part in a walking pilgrimage to Czestochowa in Poland. Due to an inconsistency in the personal documents of her Italian friends with whom she was travelling to the event, State Security focused on her. They brought her in for questioning twice and tried to get information from her about Olomouc Catholic circles. At the same time, they began to pressure her at the university to give up her religion or switch to another field of study. The increasing pressure wore her down and she rather left the school. She finished complementary secondary economics studies and worked as a secretary. She completed her university education in civics and Czech language at Palacký University after the Velvet Revolution while raising two children and having a full-time job. She subsequently taught at several primary schools and at the Secondary School of Agriculture in Olomouc. At the end of her working career she worked as a secretary for Bishop Josef Nuzík. In 2023, Marie Jónová was living in Olomouc and taking care of her ill mother.