Tereza Boučková

* 1957

  • "Well, and then when I was in Bartholomew's for 48 hours, that was hard too." - "Three, or where were you?" - "Well, I don't know anymore, well. In the main building, they had cells down there and I was in a pre-trial detention cell. Of course, I was 22 by then, I was a big girl. They picked me up, that's when I went to Ivan Dejmal's lecture at the housing seminar, and the cops just came in there and, they took it by the names they knew, I guess, and that's how I came to them as Kohoutová. So I was the only woman that was picked up and taken away at that time, and it was kind of difficult for me because I was alone in that cell."

  • "I read it [the text of Charter 77] when I came to see my dad, when we learned that something was happening, we didn't really know what, because if I remember correctly, it was actually kept secret what was happening - just that the self-proclaimed losers wanted to destroy the system. So I went to my dad's place and it was already full of people and there was something going on, and so that's when I got the Charter and then I started rewriting it and just carrying it around and giving it to all kinds of people and stuff. So I read it at the time, but I didn't know what was so objectionable about it that it made the regime so mad. Because the Charter itself wasn't really a revolutionary or controversial document at all, so that's what surprised me about it, but it was mainly about the fact that there were brave people who wanted to see rights respected, well, that's what it was."

  • "At night we heard shouting from the street and by then someone was driving a car around Prague and calling out that we were occupied and my mother and her boyfriend got in the car to see what was going on. So they were going to Prague 6, to Kulaťák somewhere, and there were tanks coming towards them, so they had to maneuver somehow, so that they wouldn't get crushed. So they came back and then we woke up and there was my mother crying and the whole street was crying. Then when we went out in front of the house we were all shocked because then they were in the park, just in the park where we were fooling around, there were soldiers in tanks. There was a lot of shooting there the next night, because it was by the bridges, right, it was by the Jirasek Bridge, just a little bit. So I was very scared of the war, but very, I was absolutely terrified, so my mother took me to my grandmother and grandfather's place at St. John under the Rock, and there I was, all I could hear was the rumbling of the tanks as they went towards Prague or the planes. My sister was running around Prague somewhere. My brother probably did too, but me as 11 years old girl, I was so scared of the war."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 14.03.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 02:20:14
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
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    Praha, 02.05.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 01:32:26
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I wasn‘t accepted to the school because I‘m Pavel Kohout‘s daughter. I only saw him a few times a year.

Tereza Boučková
Tereza Boučková
zdroj: Archive of the witness

Tereza Boučková, née Kohoutová, first married Benešová, was born on 24 May 1957 in Prague as the youngest of three children of the writer Pavel Kohout and his second wife Anna, née Cornová. Although she saw her father only a few times a year, the fact that she was his daughter was used by the regime to oppress her. She was not admitted to the grammar school for political reasons, she studied for half a year at a two-year economic school before she managed to transfer. After graduating in 1976, she was not allowed to study at university. She therefore enrolled in a one-year graduate course at a language school, which ended with a state examination in English. In 1977, she signed Charter 77, rewrote it and disseminated it. She participated in housing seminars and performed in housing theatre, for which she was interrogated several times by State Security. She once spent forty-eight hours in detention. In 1979, she had the opportunity to emigrate, but her longing for her loved ones prevented her from doing so. In 1985, she moved with her second husband, Jiří Bouček, to the settlement of Záhrabská in the Beroun region. She and her husband adopted two boys in 1988 and 1989, and in 1991 their own son was born. After the Velvet Revolution she began to fulfil her ambitions as a writer. Her first work was officially published at the end of 1991 (before that only in samizdat). In 2024 she was living in Prague and still writing.