Jana Krutilová

* 1953

  • “Just at that time, our friends, mountaineers who went to Russian mountains, were visited by fellow Russians. They were from Hodonín so they [the Russians] were staying with them in Hodonín and they called me: 'Jana, could four of them stay at your house? They would like to go to Brno.' So, they came to Brno and stayed at our house. They were wearing tracksuits at that time, so I was a bit ashamed of them, it was not usual back then. I took them to Freedom Square, there was one of the first demonstrations, huge euphoria, enthusiasm, crowds of people... And I said, 'What do you think?' And they said, 'Well, we have demonstrations like that there as well...'"

  • "I received a summons in my mailbox from the State Security telling me to report to their workplace then and there. [I was]of course scared considering my experience with dad… And [it was] like in those late films, the system – the good guy and the mean guy: 'I am Lieutenant Tlustý, I am in charge of tramping here, but I am the good guy. I know you hang out with the good tramps; we need to distinguish the good tramps we will leave alone from the bad ones. We even caught some tramps who put a photo of Husák on a tree and were shooting at it with air rifle, but surely you are not one of them.' They basically wanted to force me to cooperate with them… that I would walk around the station on Friday and that Lieutenant Tlustý would be there in tramp clothes and I would talk to those tramps the station was always full of, and I would tell him where they were going. I of course refused that. So, they summoned me again, one had to go there. He even came home for me once. And then he got tough and started threatening me that if I did not cooperate, he would kick me out of school, that I would not graduate. I said, 'Well, I will not graduate but I will not cooperate with you.'"

  • “There was a State Security worker in every factory, of course, you did not know that they were from the State Security in theory, but everyone knew it, but officially there was an employee of the corporate control department at Zbrojovka. And he would walk around telling political jokes and watching how people reacted. However, we all knew that he was State Security Officer. And when they assigned me a flat, he came to see me – (it is) a funny story but it illustrates the era – and told me that the Party arranged a flat for me and in case I did not immediately start to subscribe to The Red Right [communist newspapers], he would make sure I did not get the flat. And it was the only time in my life when I gave in; I subscribed to The Red Right, got the flat and I stopped subscribing to The Red Right in six months. That was my only concession to the regime.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Brno, 26.01.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:10:44
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - JMK REG ED
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Father was branded as right-wing opportunist

Jana Krutilová, mid 1960s
Jana Krutilová, mid 1960s
zdroj: witness´s archive

Jana Krutilová (née Kalná) was born on 21 September 1953 in Brno. Her father Bedřich Kalný was a Half-Jew and therefore he was imprisoned in a concentration camp during the Protectorate. He managed to escape from the death march, and he was hiding at the house of his classmate from grammar school until the end of the war. He graduated from the Aviation Academy and became a fighter pilot after the war. On the night of 20 to 21 August 1968, while on duty at Brno airport, he and his entire crew refused to allow Soviet occupation aircraft to land. It consequently cost him his career and membership in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and he was allowed to do only blue-collar jobs during normalization. He was rehabilitated after 1990. Father‘s fate also caught up with Jana Krutilová. After passing her secondary school-leaving exam at the grammar school in 1973, despite her excellent grades, she was not admitted to either the Faculty of Arts of her dreams or the Faculty of Law. Eventually, she got into the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the BUT, where even applicants with cadre problems were admitted. After graduation in 1978, she worked in Zbrojovka Brno in the Foreign Trade Department. The witness was from 1968 active in renewed Junak and was a troop leader there. She kept doing it under the Pioneer organization even after Junak was cancelled again in 1970. In the 1970s and 1980s, she was also highly active in tramping which was the reason the State Security was interested in her and tried to force her to cooperate with them. During her studies at BUT, she became active in Hnutí Brontosaurus, and she was one of the founders of “Holidays with Brontosaurus.” She and her husband to this day travel around the world, including on a motorbike. In 2023 Jana Krutilová lived in her native Brno.