Marie Kyselová

* 1939

  • "Everything was a bit more relaxed at the district office, and I simply dared, I admit that I was probably provoking the secretary, or comrade secretary, a bit. At music Fridays, which were regularly held in Chrudim, I addressed him, greeted him at the music Friday: 'Čest práci,' [Honour the labour] and: 'Comrade Secretary. ' Well, I guess that was bad, because when '68 came and in the first line there were the party members being checked out, which wasn't me, and then in the second line were those who were known to disagree with the entry of Soviet troops, I was fired on the grounds of having views that were inappropriate for an employee of a district national committee."

  • "Suddenly a guy appeared, well as I say, we didn't know each other there, maybe a couple of them knew…the family knew each other, but as strangers we didn't know anyone. Well, they actually started there…the guy had a briefcase, and he took out two bottles and threw them over the fence and when they hit the ground they started to burn. And then probably the riot police came out of the side streets. Well, because they had shields, they had helmets, and they were clearing the place. Well, and I, when I realized and I remembered that I had mum and a child back home, born in '64 in July, and this was in '68 in August, so about four years old. At the station, thank God, I caught the last train that was released to Czechoslovakia. I was at the station in Pardubice at five o'clock in the morning."

  • "As I moved from the Pardubice City Construction Company to the district national committee after my maternity leave, so the construction company was a kind of 'family business' where mostly all people were former trades people. The people who worked there might be in the Communist Party, I don't know, I never was, but they certainly didn't take it that seriously. And when I moved over to the district office, I was used to being addressed as 'Hello' and 'Mr./Mrs.', but I got a message from the secretary at the time that at the district national committee we greeted each other: 'Čest práci' [Honour the labour] and we addressed each other: ‚Soudruhu‘ a ‚Soudružko‘ [male and female equivalents of Comrade, trans.]."

  • "They simply told my father there that after finishing grammar school I was not eligible, being from Schmoranz family. Although maybe it wasn't so much because of the reasons, for example, that I was from a trade family, but there was also the fact that Schmoranzová from Slatiňany was not eligible, because there was some personal interest of the Minister of Education, Zdeněk Nejedlý, who had been in contact with Gustav Schmoranz [my father's uncle and guardian]. He was a director in the National Theatre in those days, in fact in the days of Zdeněk Nejedlý's studies. So he [Zdeněk Nejedlý], by and large, was somehow personally interested in the Schmoranz family, so that they couldn't study any more, the Schmoranzes from Slatiňany. Well, my father explained it to me at the time, he said: 'You know, girl, there's all kinds of stuff going on in the matter and there could be this or that, and look, mum´s getting on,' - mum was born in 1906, wasn't she - 'so mum's getting on, I could finish here any time, and mum probably wouldn´t manage it if she had to support you at university somewhere. ' Otherwise, before this, I had been prepared all the time to carry on the family tradition of studying architecture, right. Construction. Well, by that time I was, what, seventeen, there were already some boyfriends, I mean, I'd had a student love since I was fifteen. Well, I got over it pretty well. For me, this kind of bad attitude towards the adversities here was significant more after 1968."

  • "When there was currency reform, which I didn't understand either, my impression was that it was going to be easier to count, so [dad] earned a thousand crowns. As I was just saying I would have loved to go to one of those summer camps that my classmates used to go to, right. So I was allowed to apply, but I got a bill and the price was 999 for the three-week camp. And my dad, who before, I mean, before the currency reform, had had a salary of 5,000 a month, after the currency was changed, it was recalculated 1:5, he had 1,000 crowns. So my parents explained to me that it was not possible for them to pay 999 crowns for my three-week camp out of the salary, because we had to live on something. And that was the first realization that I had in relation to the right approach to all people that was being promoted at that time. That all people were equal and so on."

  • "I didn't have such bad direct experience as a child, because my parents simply protected me from all that, I know more about it by hearing what was going on. As a kind of an unforgettable experience it remained in me that we were returning from my grandmother's, where I was hidden with my mother, from Zaječice, and we actually got into the stream of refugees from the East who were fleeing away from the Red Army."

  • "Dad, he was a son of Jan Schmoranz, one of the sons of the old František Schmoranz Sr., and dad was born in 1896. He also ended up growing up in an incomplete family there, because his father Jan Schmoranz, among other things being a fire brigade chief, caught a cold while putting out a fire. As he had diabetes, for which at that time there was no medication, it was only kept under control by a diet, so then during putting out the fire, he developed severe pneumonia and died."

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    Hradec Králové, 02.04.2019

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She was at the Soviet embassy in Vienna when the Molotov cocktails were burning there on 21 August 1968

Marie Kyselová
Marie Kyselová
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Marie Kyselová, née Schmoranzová, was born on 31 July 1939 in Slatiňany. Due to the personal antipathy which the Minister of Education Zdeněk Nejedlý held against the Schmoranz family, she was not allowed to study at university. Her relatives who were private farmers lost all their property and some of them even their freedom. Her mother had to work until she was seventy-five years old so that the communist regime would grant her at least a small pension. The witness travelled to Vienna in 1968, where she learned of the occupation of Czechoslovakia. She headed with other people to protest at the Soviet embassy and witnessed someone throwing two Molotov cocktails there. After returning home, she was protesting and spreading petitions against the entry of the occupying armies. During the upcoming normalization, she was dismissed from her job at a district national committee, where she had worked in the planning department. It was only after a long time and by somebody´s intercession that she managed to get a low-paid job in road administration. After the Velvet Revolution, the witness joined KDU-ČSL [Christian Democratic Union - Czechoslovak People´s Party] and as a member worked actively in Slatiňany. In 2019, she was living in a nursing home in Slatiňany.