Iva Kotrlá

* 1947

  • "It was ten people. I have photos of it here. And the unelected leader was Ludvík Vaculík. He used to say that we were a junta and that we must not accept anyone else among us. He was very strict about it. And that's why he had disputes with Václav Havel, because Václav Havel was such a threatening element for him. Vaculík used to say that he would never want him in the group because he was dangerous, he would get us into trouble and we couldn't do anything. It seemed to him that Václav Havel went over the dead bodies, that he didn't care. He blamed Havel for writing a letter to the President and for going down the throat of the monster. Havel in turn reproached Vaculik for being a coward, for being cautious. But it is true that in all these years we have never been discovered, never been driven away. Even Havel was there with us once in Kyjov. It was peaceful. We always wrote down the next meeting place on post-it notes, it was not spoken about out loud. There were ten of us, and each time we met at someone else's house to put together a magazine called Content. Everyone brought their own contribution, ten copies, because we couldn't fit more than ten copies in the bike rack. We met at somebody's apartment, and there the submissions were spread out on the carpet, and then everybody took one issue and then it was reproduced in different ways. Anyway, there was always Ludvík's feuilleton at the end on the yellow paper, then there was a section about books, then political reflections and poems... It was varied."

  • "My husband has been to Hrádeček [Václav Havel's cottage] two or three times. There was also a meeting there. He said they had to sneak through the woods to get there, but he got there. I wasn't there. Sometimes I had to stay at home with the children. My husband was also once invited to Zvěřina's [Roman Catholic priest and Charter 77 signatory Josef Zvěřina] birthday party. The party was held at the cottage of Marie Rút Křížková [spokesperson for Charter 77]. Her husband went there by car. Milan Uhde, Jan Trefulka and Zdeněk Rotrekl drove and went with him. The security had the whole cottage surrounded, all the access roads, nobody could get in. Security stopped them, of course. My husband thought it would be bad. Milan Uhde describes it nicely in his book of memories. Fortunately, the policemen didn't ask them for their IDs, they asked my husband where they were going. And the husband told them that he was a co-worker and that they were going there to guard the place, and they let them go. And when they arrived at the cottage, nobody understood that they had gotten there. And the husband said that he wasn't even lying because they were collaborators, but with another party... Milan Uhde still remembers it, that it was an amazing experience."

  • "Two sisters lived next door to the two peasants. They never joined [the JZD]. It was like when you see the movie All the Good Natives. Those sisters were poor. They drove a wagon, farmed the fields, they were hit, but they didn't give up. For me, it was such a phenomenon on our street. But people didn't appreciate it. They mocked them in the style of whether they needed it. That was the atmosphere there. It seemed to me that whoever was in the JZD was a higher elite, something more. He worked in the fields. He got paid for it, he still had a little garden behind the field, he grew some vegetables there for himself and he was perceived as a better person. And those who stayed to work in the fields and didn't join the JZD, they were perceived in society as people of weak minds, that they were not normal."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Brno, 19.06.2018

    (audio)
    délka: 03:02:19
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

In times of difficulty, I always thought of all the strong Christian women

Iva Kotrlá, youth
Iva Kotrlá, youth
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Iva Kotrlá was born on 16 December 1947 in Tasovice near Znojmo to a single mother. From an early age she showed literary talent. In her memoirs she vividly describes the picture of the fearful 1950s in totalitarian Czechoslovakia. Because of her views, she had to leave her university studies in the 1970s. Together with her husband Zdeněk, she later belonged to the Prague literary group of Ludvík Vaculík, which published banned literature in samizdat. Her texts were also repeatedly broadcast by Vatican Radio. The whole family was under the surveillance of the StB until the Velvet Revolution. Her husband was suspended by the regime in 1985 for damaging the reputation of Czechoslovakia abroad. In 1986 she signed the Charter 77 declaration. In 2018, she lived in Brno.