Zlata Kaprálová

* 1957

  • "That was so crazy... That was... The guards were there, I would say they were lesbians. It was tough, they beat us, and I spent some time in solitary confinement. The solitary confinement was twice... maybe two meters by one meter - there were only two iron bars and a wooden bed. You got a green felt blanket for the night, one bucket, and that was it. Otherwise nothing, they shaved your head."

  • "On his way from work, they picked him up and took him to Držovice or even further away. There they beat him, took his shoes, and sent him home walking. Three, four hours, after work! After a twelve-hour shift and in the morning at ten o'clock he had to go to work again. We never absented in work or anything like that, that's why they couldn't get at us. They couldn't prove that we were doing anything wrong, the flyers or anything, because we had it all hidden in the basement."

  • "When we went to Częstochowa in Poland, we were at the border and they told us... I remember they were watching a sports match, I don't know if it was football or hockey, I'm not sure. I would say football, but that's irrelevant. So they wouldn't let us go, I remember they said our republic wasn't interested in us going, and they turned us back from the border. So we went to a pub somewhere and asked if there was any way we could get there. So they told us that at what time, they knew these Poles, when they change... it was the Polish-Czech border, when they change shifts, that nobody should be there anymore. So we got changed, shirts in, hair combed to be ready... We got there and one of them was just going to put the stamp in to let us through the gatehouse (there was a gatehouse there) and then another guy came out from the back because he was watching the match in the afternoon. So they turned us back and wouldn't let us in. Then again, before our train went, we went to a restaurant there, and the guys there offered to transfer us. That they knew the way to Poland, that it was no problem. And so I was all for it, I was always very enthusiastic about such things, so I was all for it. But Jeňa asked me if I was crazy because I had two kids at home. So we went home, we didn't go anywhere, we went back."

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    Olomouc, 21.03.2023

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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I soon realized that there was another way to live

Zlata Kaprálová in Budapest, 1984
Zlata Kaprálová in Budapest, 1984
zdroj: Zlata Kaprálová’s personal archive

Zlata Kaprálová, maiden name Rybářová, was born on 10 May 1957 in Hradec Králové as the older of two daughters to Maria, nee. Bakovská and Ladislav Rybář. She lived with her parents and grandmother in nearby Probluz. Her father was a barber, her mother worked in the blue-collar professions. Zlata was brought up mostly by her grandmother. She didn‘t finish the first year of hairdressing school because of absenteeism, she started to go among the so-called „máničkas“ (i.e. young people with long hair, typically men), looking to find her true self like most teenagers. She ran away from home and struggled for two months, then wandered to a diagnostic institute and then to a borstal in Černovice near Tábor, where she spent a traumatic two years. In the borstal, she trained as a seamstress. After her release, she worked in Nový Bydžov in textile production, and later in the Univerzal company in Prostějov. In 1976 she married Josef Vidrna, a member of the band Avernus, and their son Lukáš was born the same year. She married for the second time in 1978 to Jan Kaprál, a waiter from Prostějov, where the family then lived. They attended illegal music events in Czechoslovakia, and in the 1980s they went to concerts in Hungary. In 1979, they were involved in the transcription and distribution of samizdat publications. In 1980, their younger son Jan was born. In response to their anti-regime activities, their older son Lukáš was taken away from them. He returned home after half a year. After the revolution, Zlata and her husband opened a hospitality business. In 2020, she received the award of a participant in the resistance and opposition to communism. Her husband Jan died in 2009. In 2023, Zlata Kaprálová lived with her boyfriend Emil Juřena in Stražisk near Prostějov.