Prof. PhDr., DrSc. Oldřich Uličný

* 1936

  • "It was on a Tuesday and I remember, I pretty much always used to work late, that I woke up late, and now my then wife, because she died 25 years ago, poor thing, so she told me that we were occupied by the Russians. As I was sleepy, I just didn't know what was going on, what was going on. I know I somehow got out, I saw people running around the streets, talking about it. I went to the faculty, there were already a few people there. What are we gonna do... we got the Poles, that'd be good. Well, we wrote in Polish: brothers Poles, go home here it's... like you're controlled by the Russians and stuff like that. My colleague and I - we didn't have cars, we were glad we had a bicycle - we went on bicycles to post it. And how the streets were full of their vans of all kinds, trucks, I don't know why, probably it was just a demonstration of that power, because there were no soldiers there, just the driver. As we were driving by that driver, we waved at him and shouted something against the Russians, and his passenger pulled out a gun. Just to threaten us, of course. So we stood on the pedals and thought, 'Well, I guess the Poles won't be all that cool.' Well, we did all sorts of things, we made all sorts of committees, but it was led by those Dubček people. What in this situation, that's when the communist offered us the membership. Then came the Two Thousand Words, no it was before that, sometime in the summer, and we said, 'Now it's time for the faculty to sign the Two Thousand Words.' So we organized it and then it was based on that because we turned it in. Immediately one of those comrades took it away, and then the sanctions came." - "That was the beginning?" - "That was the beginning, that we signed it and we stood up that week, 14 days. We were desperate that it was even possible, but we were naive, we thought it couldn't be done. But the most naive was Dubček and the group around him, after all, he grew up in Russia... No, they were believers, they knew that everything is nice, what is Russian is nice."

  • "Well, the way I lived through it was that I was very involved there. I started there in 1961 and for seven years, up until the arrival, I had built up quite a professional reputation, I really worked very hard on myself. I was trained by our leading linguist, professor Vachek in Prague, there was this professional career ahead of me. I knew that nothing would come of it in terms of promotion, I would still be on my own, but it worked. Then, when the year sixty-eight came, there were really such fools in the faculty leadership, even people with no education. Marxism just, these people didn't have maybe even a secondary school graduation, it shows, moreover, when they didn't want to work manually. A few of us there more or less got together only during those public meetings that started after Dubček's involvement. So we just got involved there, and it turned out that in '68 we were involved too much, but we were also a little bit afraid, and we said what's going to happen. Until Husák came along, who got it all so mixed up that he reportedly saved people from being deported to Russia, because that was really something to be afraid of, if you think about it, the bigger cities were full of their uniforms, there were tanks at the airports. The truth is, we were... Hradec Králové was occupied by the Poles at first, and it was possible to talk to them, although there were also some ugly faces who pulled guns on us, but nothing important happened. We put up posters, held all kinds of meetings, of course it was all for nothing. Only that we discredited ourselves enough to get the party members fired immediately in '69 after Husák came in. Many of them ended up really badly, because doing physical work after fifty is something that a person who had sat at a desk and thought all his life cannot endure. Many died prematurely or went into disability retirement. I managed to get into that factory and there I worked as a translator of technical literature. It was a factory called Závody Vítězného února (Engineering Works), formerly Škodovka. It was founded by the Škoda workers during the First Republic, we mockingly called it 'U vítězného Nora'. It was very pleasant there, but one still was attracted towards the faculty. For example, I always went to the basketball game there. Well, it turned out that a woman comrade who then came to take my place, in that 1972 gradually climbed up the party line in the leadership of the department and was able to order that I couldn't cross the threshold of the faculty, so I couldn't even go to the basketball game."

  • "When the front was going back - the Germans went first, of course, they were always delayed. I have to say that they did move us out, but fortunately the farmhouse was big, so we had somewhere to move - they took over the main room and the big hall next door, and I remember there were all sorts of transmitters and electronic things in there, it was still Wehrmacht. They behaved themselves, even two of them stayed with my grandmother for maybe 14 days, they were kind of older guys already, Werwolf. So they admired the old lady and talked to her in all sorts of ways. She didn't know a word of German, she thought that German [Němec in Czech, trans.] was for being dumb [němý], so she shouted at them in Czech. She thought that if they were dumb, she must shout at them so that they could hear her a little. They called her Mamushka, it was such a wartime idyll. Then suddenly they disappeared, the SS men came, it was a bit worse. Dad, who could speak German quite well from the town school, made it clear that he couldn't speak German. One of them asked him for a ladder, and my father kept saying he didn't understand. The little soldier found it himself and my father said something very rude in Czech about him. And he suddenly says in Czech: 'Be careful!' He was from Sudetenlands, which was somehow indistinguishable, but I have to say that they behaved decently. They didn't persecute anybody, after all they considered us, Czechs and Moravians, to be better than Poles, Russians and Ukrainians, whose lives they didn't care about. So somehow we survived, and then... Svoboda's soldiers liberated us. They were mostly Slovaks, who were easy to talk to, but there was suddenly an alarm, as the Americans were still flying, so we spent the night in a shelter, in a potato cellar next door. Then we came back, the Svoboda soldiers were gone and with them our father's pocket watch, which he had unwisely left in the cupboard behind the glass. But we were glad that we had been liberated and the watch was not spoken of."

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    Olomouc, 03.04.2023

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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As a nation, we learned that it is possible to live a lie

Oldřich Uličný, secondary school graduation photo, 1954
Oldřich Uličný, secondary school graduation photo, 1954
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Prof. PhD. Oldřich Uličný, DrSc. was born on 29 September 1936 in Pravčice as the eldest of three sons to Božena, née Forýtková, and Oldřich Uličný. His father owned a farm in Pravčice, and before 1948 he was chairman of the People‘s Party. His mother came from a farming family from Těšnovice. In the 1950s, his father joined a cooperative farm so that Oldřich could study at the grammar school in Kroměříž. He studied Czech at the Pedagogical University in Olomouc and in 1958-62 Russian at the Faculty of Arts of Palacký University in Olomouc. Then he completed postgraduate studies in mathematical linguistics in Prague and in 1969 he received his PhD. In 1958-1961 he worked as a secondary school teacher at the Jan Žižka z Trocnova Military School in Moravská Třebová and then as an assistant teacher at the Faculty of Education in Hradec Králové until 1972. He became a signatory of the declaration Two Thousand Words. Because of his attitudes and activities, he had to leave the university in 1968 and worked, among other things, as an information engineer at the Engineering Works in Hradec Králové. He was able to return to his profession only twenty years later. In the 1970s he was listed by State Security as a person under investigation. From 1990 to 2007 he worked at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, and later at the Faculty of Arts of Palacký University in Olomouc. In 2002-2020 he was the head of the Department of Czech Language and Literature at the Technical University in Liberec. He and his wife Hana raised two sons, Tomáš (1961) and Jan (1965). He has a daughter Jana (1972) from another relationship. After the deaths of his wife and son Jan, he remarried in 2004. He and his wife Lenka are raising their son Oldřich Tobiáš. In 2023 he was living in Olomouc.