Mgr. Eva Novotná

* 1933

  • "And now this one came up...the fact that the kids aren't allowed to continue in their studies. We had a terrible quarrel about it, a bunch of the young ones, in that school. The old ones were telling us, 'There's nothing you can do, get away from it! There's nothing to be done, it's a class revenge, there's nothing to be done about it, give it a rest.' And I said to myself that I wasn't going to give it a rest, that I cared about these children, and so I picked myself up and went to the district party committee, and there I stormed into the secretary's office and told him what I thought about these children not being allowed to continue their studies. All are always going on about lighting and burning bright, so we have lit these children on fire and these are the children, who want to study, you are talking about our need for every talented person to make our country develop. You can't punish kids for having parents you don't like. These are gifted children and they need to study. By that time, I had already graduated, I had already passed the state exams, I even had the paper that I was a graduate teacher, and now it looked like, after what I had dared to do there, at the beginning of that June...so first the good headmaster Vitek was shouted down terribly. A communist, but a good communist, he didn't bother us, he didn't demand any bows to the gods. He served us quietly and let us do whatever we wanted. So he was the one who was blamed for not leading me in the right course, and for not educating me in socialist patriotism and in the right insight into what the class struggle is and what those bright tomorrows are. It looked like I was going to go to some Kunštát or Boříkovice again or something of the kind. As punishment."

  • "There was, for example, a special department, from the year seventy-seven, a special department where books were dispatched, 'special funds' it was called, which were not allowed to get into the hands of ordinary readers. At regular intervals, an unsigned list of what must not come into the hands of readers came from the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of the Interior. All that had to go into those special funds. And these were, for example, books that were completely harmless, only the translation of the book was done by someone whose name was not allowed to appear in public. Of course, there were a lot of scientific journals, and newspapers, and a lot of that went into the special funds. But again, the people who were around the special funds, it was two ladies who knew, that they were doing terribly dangerous work, and the head of that sector, these people were giving permissions to go into those special funds to a number of people, who they had verified, that they weren't going to speak to others about it."

  • "Then in the 1941 autumn, I know we were burning brushwood in the garden, and in the evening Mrs. Lederer suddenly appeared at our house and gave my mother a box. Smaller than this, about half the size, she said they were going away and she wanted my mother to keep it with her. In it were...when we looked in the box, there were all kinds of gold things, probably family valuables, and Mommy spent the whole war moving them around, hiding them. Every time something happened in the family, or something happened nearby, or somebody got arrested, she and my grandmother would look for a hiding place for this box. It lasted with us until 1945. In the forty-fifth year, during the liberation, after the 9th of May, when the Russian army appeared in Kyšperk, which came from Moravia, from this direction, and because there were quite big yards near the houses, they moved in our yard about five carts with horses. There was a little room upstairs in the house, and in the evening Daddy locked us up in the little room, Grandma, Mummy, and us two girls, and he put a cupboard in front of the door, and he stayed downstairs with the soldiers. And when he let us out in the morning, we found that what we had in the cellar, I'll explain why it was there later, was gone. The alarm clock, my grandmother's watch, the blankets, the Lederer’s box, and the jar of eggs. All that was gone, and various valuables, the clock from the apartment, that was gone too. Well, from that moment on, we became kind of bitter towards our liberators."

  • "You have to serve this year in the borderlands, they said. My first assignment was to Nekoř, I was there for a year. That was a village where... there was a sign hanging by the Nekoř marker saying, 'We are ashamed of our parents who don't want to join the cooperative.' I rode my bike there, and I rode back home around that sign, to work at the sawmill, to see my dad. And my dad poured me some molasses out of a thermos and said, 'Dear girl, you have to accept the assignment, or you'll be considered to be a freeloader and you'll get arrested.' So I went back and I went to the local school again to introduce myself. I was there for a year, and after a year I got an assignment to Orlické Záhoří, it was then still called Kunštát, it was a village that was completely displaced, originally entirely German, completely displaced, populated by, I'll say it, as we used to say it then, gypsies from Romania. The only Czech there was Jiří Mandl, the head of the sawmill. And otherwise, that was all... maybe there was a German person there. And there were these children in the school. And the head of the school was a slightly older classmate of mine from Kostelec nad Orlicí, Ladislav Rázl, and he said that I was assigned there because he was leaving for some school at our embassy in Egypt or something. He succeeded to get the job and now he was going there. And he said, 'Hey, but you can't be here, there can't be a woman here.' And he pulled out this drawer and he said, 'Look here. I'm sleeping at the school, and I have to have this by my bed at night,' and there was a revolver."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 03.02.2023

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    Praha, 15.02.2023

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That era was horrible, but it couldn‘t prevent me from trying to live my life to the fullest

Eva Novotná, at that time Machová
Eva Novotná, at that time Machová
zdroj: Eva Novotná’s archive

Eva Novotná, née Machová, was born on 2 December 1933 in Kyšperk (now Letohrad) at the foothills of the Orlické Mountains. After the Munich Agreement‘s signing and the Czechoslovak border area secession, her hometown found itself in the immediate vicinity of the border. As a child, she experienced the situation primarily through her loved ones, perceiving their well-founded fears of the future. She also remembers other events related to the German occupation, the situation in the town at the end of the war, and the subsequent expulsion of the German population and its consequences. Shortly after the war, she began studying at the grammar school in Kostelec nad Orlicí, and in 1950, she changed over to the pedagogical grammar school in Hradec Králové, hoping that after graduation she would be able to continue her studies at university. She was finally accepted to study at the Faculty of Education after a year‘s work experience in one of the displaced border villages in the Orlické Mountains. After graduation, she moved to Prague, started teaching, married, and had children. She describes the many hardships of everyday life under real socialism, but also the hope that accompanied the so-called Prague Spring and the subsequent shock after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. After her political screening interview, she had to leave school because of her disapproval of the invasion and soon decided to leave education altogether. In 1977, she started working at the National Library, and until 1989, she worked as head of the audiovisual center, and after the Velvet Revolution, as head of the public relations department. She participated in the transformation of the National Library into a modern institution. She hosted author broadcasts on Czech Radio for several years, taught at the Higher School of Informatics, and cooperated with the Writers‘ Association. At the time of the interview for Memory of the Nations (2023), she lived alternately in Prague and Letohrad and continued to write articles for various periodicals focused on the reflection of contemporary events.