Mgr. Rebeka Křižanová-Bartůňková

* 1971

  • There were about six or ten of us who always met there. We were there together, and I have one memory of it, like one time I went, I don't remember if it was in January or October or which one it was exactly, but I went down Stepanska and there were antons and all these armored cars, yellow and white, VB, standing everywhere. And there went these armed men, they had their shields in front of them and they were walking in such a line, running to Wenceslas Square to sort of line up according to some of these systems they had for that. And I just remember that I thought it was absolutely terrible that as they were running, they were trotting lightly and hitting the shields with their batons, and they had a kind of a shout for themselves to motivate themselves: 'Beat them, beat them up', and they were hitting the Plexiglas with their batons."

  • „Pak tam byla ještě jedna učitelka, která učila tělocvik a přírodopis, a ta také trvala na tom, že jí nesmíme říkat ,soudružko´. A to z dnešního pohledu neprošlo na každé škole, to nebylo, že by si učitel dovolil říct před třídou plnou žáků, o kterých neví, z jakých rodin jsou. Takže to byla taková moje vzpomínka na školu. Pak jsme měli výbornou třídní, která učila ruštinu, ale také to byla velmi slušná ženská. Bylo tam těch učitelů víc, kteří nebyli ve straně. Nějak jsme to o nich jakoby věděli, protože to dávali najevo, třeba mi řekla: ,Ty seš z takový rodiny, tobě já můžu věřit.´ Dokonce jedna mladá učitelka se mě ptala, jestli doma nemáme Bibli, že by si jí chtěla půjčit. Já jsem to říkala rodičům a také je zvláštní, že už jsem jako dítě věděla, že to je něco v nepořádku, že se na mě rodiče budou zlobit. To je také zvláštní, přitom mi nikdo neřekl: ,Bible se nepůjčuje, Bible je něco, co se nesmí,´ nebo co tady prostě není v souladu s oficiální linií a překvapilo mě, že máma řekla: ,Tak jo, tak jí to prostě půjč.´ A já jsem tedy tady té paní učitelce Petroušové nesla tu Bibli a ona ještě řekla: ,Opatrně, aby to nikdo neviděl,´ a takhle si to přendavala z mojí tašky do aktovky, do nějaké tašky, a říkala: ,Neboj se.´ A pak mi to zase za měsíc nebo za jakou dobu vrátila, že moc děkuje." "Then there was another teacher who taught PE and science, and she also insisted that we not call her 'comrade'. And that, from today's point of view, didn't pass in every school, it wasn't that the teacher dared to say it in front of a class full of pupils they didn't know what kind of families they were from. So that was kind of my memory of school. Then we had an excellent class teacher who taught Russian, but she was also a very decent woman. There were more of those teachers who were not in the party. Somehow we sort of knew about them because they showed it, for example she said to me, `You are from such a family, I can trust you.` Even one young teacher asked me if we had a Bible at home, that she wanted to borrow it. I told my parents, and it's also strange that even as a child I knew something was wrong, that my parents would be angry with me. That's also strange, but nobody said to me, 'You don't lend a Bible, a Bible is something you're not allowed to do,' or that's just not in line with the official line here, and I was surprised that my mom said, 'Okay, just lend it to her. ' And so I brought the Bible to the teacher here, Mrs. Petroušová, and she said, 'Be careful that nobody sees it,' and she moved it from my bag to her briefcase, to some bag, and she said, 'Don't worry,' and then she gave it back to me a month or so later, and she said thank you very much."

  • I want to say that my grandmother was thirty-two years old, she had three boys, one of them was my father - the middle one. My grandfather was four years older, so about thirty-six. And then the whole family lived with the stigma of a family not only of a traitor and a class enemy, but also of a murderer. So, of course, this was very widely disseminated and the propaganda worked with it. Because my grandmother moved away, had to move away from Valmez, she returned to her parents in the village of Branky, which is a village about six kilometers from Valmez in the direction of Bystřice pod Hostýnem. There she lived with her parents, who helped her with the children, and there were about three families in the village who were not afraid or helped them. But otherwise, in fact, all those people turned away from them because they were terribly afraid, or maybe some of them even agreed to it. Of course, there were also convinced communists there, and so they lived there as if excommunicated on the margins, because what was really happening was that these people were crossing over to the other sidewalk, spitting. Like, I remember my dad telling me this thing once, that he remembers a teacher calling him up to the podium at school and saying, `Well, look, kids, this is the son of a murderer and don't talk to him and watch out for him,' so that's basically what they grew up with."

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    Praha, 02.07.2021

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    Praha, 11.02.2022

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To visit the West during totalitarianism was as absurd a notion as if we wanted to go to Mars today

Rebeka Křižanová-Bartůňková in 2022
Rebeka Křižanová-Bartůňková in 2022
zdroj: Post Bellum

Rebeka Křižanová-Bartůňková was born on 15 May 1971 in Prague into the family of dissident and initiator of the petition Several Sentences Jiří Křižan. Her family was marked by the tragic story of her grandfather, Jan Křižan, who was executed by the communist regime in 1951 in a fabricated political trial. The memoirist signed and disseminated Several Sentences while still a senior in high school. She was also a regular participant in many anti-regime demonstrations, including during Palach Week, during which riot police brutally cracked down on otherwise peaceful protesters. In the autumn of 1989, she was threatened with disciplinary proceedings at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University, where she entered the mass communication department the same year. This did not happen, however, because the Velvet Revolution had begun. Rebecca survived a crackdown by armed men on Národní třída and soon afterwards joined the student strike together with other classmates from the faculty. She was one of those who started contributing to the Student newspaper, founded by Pavel „Pažout“ Žáček in December 1989. During the 1990s, Rebeka Křižanová-Bartůňková established herself as an investigative journalist, dramaturge and documentary filmmaker. In 2022 she lived in Prague.