Hana Palcová

* 1946

  • “So, then he put on the works: ‘You have a child, eh? And what if he doesn’t come home today?’ And I say: ‘Why wouldn’t he? He’s a good boy.’ He was a first-grader then. [StB agent]: ‘He won’t make it home because he’ll get run over!’”

  • “For philosophy we had Professor Karel Mácha, and he wanted to get rehabilitated, or maybe it was that they simply forced him to speak about Lenin in the great auditorium at Charles. Lenin had some anniversary at the time, so he had no choice but to accomodate them, so after us all being crammed into the auditorium, Mácha gets up and says: ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin – what a model!’ And then he started to cry. And then silence. He couldn’t pull himself together… We got up, left, and said: ‘Well, that was short.’ Later, he emigrated because the police drove him into despair, they had a wire in his apartment, he had a crazy story, but he emigrated in the end.”

  • “It must have been pretty soon after I saw it [the Charter 77], and I said: That’s it, exactly what we’ve been waiting for this whole time! Breaking the Helsinki Accords, and in the third paragraph, about human rights… I said: ‘Hand me a pen,’ but my colleague said: ‘No, no, no, don’t sign it! You’ve got a little kid, don’t do it!’ It must have been early, sometime in January…”

  • “There was a tank, yeah, so we went up to it and said: ‘Go back, nothing’s happening here… (We always did that.) No counter-revolution here, you’ve got bad information, off you go.’ And then they started acting really nasty, another tank or some vehicle or another pulled up, a man ran up to us, saying: ‘You’ve lost your minds, girls, come on before they mow you down!’ Then they pulled us into the arcade, where they pushed us back into the crowd.”

  • “I said: ‘No, I have to go back! I must go back! It’s my home, I have to go back!’ They said: ‘Don’t be a loon. Look, here’s the map. The Russians are starting to surround us here.’ It was June sixty-eight. And then Jimmy said: ‘You really think they’d just leave it like that? You’re nuts! They’re going to occupy you! And it won’t be long either.’”

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Faith in freedom and patriotism brought her home twice

Hana Palcová, USA 1968
Hana Palcová, USA 1968
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Hana Palcová, née Škarpíšková, was born on 4 December 1946 in Prague- Bubeneč to a family of school teachers. When she only was six years old, her mother Zora died and her father Vladimír remarried. She studied at a secondary school focused on health services and, later, sociology at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University. In May 1968, she was invited to the United States for several weeks. There, at a university in Gainesville, she had the opportunity to share her experience of life in socialist Czechoslovakia by lecturing a group of political science students. Soon after her return home, she witnessed the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies. At the time she was working at a national arts agency called Pragokoncert, and later she worked as a curator for the Roma (then known as “Gypsy“) population. She came to know of the Charter 77, but her colleagues talked her out of signing it. Nonetheless, later, after losing her job and maintaining contact with the traveler Jiří Hanzelka, she would find herself under the purview of the communist State Security, and was subject to their investigations, during which she was threatened. She and her husband, Miloslav Palec, decided to emigrate. On Christmas 1979, Hana, along with their nine-year-old son, set out for Austria, where it wasn’t long before Miloslav met up with them. The found refuge with their Austrian friends that they had met before in Czechoslovakia. In June 1980, they went to the United States of America. From 1986 till 1996 the witness worked as a newscaster and editor in the Czechoslovak editorial office of the Voice of America radio station. In the 1990s, the family returned to their homeland.