Zora Novická

* 1946

  • "How about your first memory, what do you remember?" – “It may sound ridiculous, but I remember that I longed for my mother to buy me chocolate. Which was not possible because there were food stamps. Everything was available only on the tickets, we stood in queues and such a chocolate bar was not possible. And it was just for the kids then, we called it a little soup, I don't know what they were doing, but it was just terrible. Well, we ate it. It was made of some potato starch, it was pinkish-yellow-white, quite disgusting, but there was nothing else on stock.”

  • "I went to Stuttgart in 1967, because I wanted to do mineralogy, petrography and then move on to gemmology. Well, do you know what gemmology is? It is the science of precious stones. Then I actually started studying there at the university, but in 1968 the so-called Warsaw Pact troops broke in. I thought I already had a diploma, that I would study there, but my mother kept writing me desperate letters. She was terribly afraid, she remembered the persecutions we experienced under the communists, it wasn't funny at all. That night, for example, ten soldiers broke in there, put us against the wall, and now they have turned the whole house upside down. God knows what they were looking for. So my mother was scared and wrote to me, 'My sister was kicked out of college, and I don't want to experience it again.' So I came back in 1969, finished my thesis, graduated from university and in 1970 I started working at the uranium research.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Dobříš, 21.12.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 48:17
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

During the normalization, I found out I was in a cage

Zora Novická (en)
Zora Novická (en)
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Zora Novická, née Venclová, was born on September 9, 1946 in Trnava. Before the communist regime, her father ran shops and was imprisoned several times after 1948 for anti-regime attitude. Zora thus had a bad staff profile and could not apply for her dream gemmology, the science of precious stones, instead she went to study at the University of Mining in Ostrava. In 1968 she took the opportunity to study in Stuttgart, Germany, but after the occupation of the Warsaw Pact troops, she returned to Czechoslovakia in 1969. Since 1970, she has been working on uranium exploration in Příbram, and due to her origins and relatives abroad, she was regularly interrogated. After the Velvet Revolution, she worked for an environmental company and the Ministry of the Environment. In 2020, she lived in Dobříš.