Zdeňka Coufalová

* 1958

  • "And in about 1985, I was suddenly summoned to the education office to see the inspectors, and the inspectors happened to be my former colleagues. And I went in there and I thought, I wonder why they're summoning me, maybe they're calling me because they know I want to work in the village in the kindergarten, so maybe they'll say, look, there's a teaching position open in the village, you could go there. So I went there in complete peace and my headmistress said, well you know, I should go with you, but I'm not going to go, and suddenly she got ill. She was just ill, so I went alone. And there was an inspector waiting for me, one, not two, just the one, and she said, well, you know, we invited you, we have a report on you, and you're reported here as being such an unreliable person, and we need you to give us an explanation. Now I was left completely... I didn't know what was going on. And now I had to answer questions like if I wanted to study special education so I can deal with disabled children, that's exactly the wording. Then, for example, that there were suspicious people from the Chartists' circle. And those people did meet with us, but we also met with them again in other flats where we... there was discussion or discussion of the life of, for example, Masaryk or the life of Comenius, things that were important at the time. Or maybe, you probably also don't know that we were distributing or that there was a possibility to distribute so-called forbidden literature."

  • "When the first election was held, I remember exactly, there was no avoidance. In Pelhřimov, my husband and I voted, I remember that we went there, but in Česká Lípa we didn't go to vote. But I was terribly afraid that they would come home to us with the ballot boxes. Because then whoever didn't go to vote and was not checked off at the polling station, so they came home with the ballot boxes, really. And they didn't come. So my husband voted only once in his whole life, in Pelhřimov, and then never here under the communist regime. And that was also, you know, and one said, yes, I'm not going to vote, and he didn't go, and nothing came of it. There was no sanction, nothing at all."

  • "This way, because we came from a bourgeois family and in 1948 they actually took everything from us. We had a butcher's shop, we had houses, we had gardens, fields, land, and they took it all away after forty-eight when it was nationalized. In restitution they gave us back our land."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Česká Lípa, 17.02.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:07:05
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

You didn‘t go to vote and nothing happened

Zdeňka Coufalová, née Kopecká
Zdeňka Coufalová, née Kopecká
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Zdeňka Coufalová, née Kopecká, was born on 18 May 1958 in Pelhřimov. Her father, a former tradesman, worked as a deputy manager in Jednota company, her mother as a shop assistant. Zdeňka graduated from the grammar school in Pelhřimov. While still a secondary school student, she married and gave birth to a daughter Dominika and later a son Ondřej. Her mother helped her with her upbringing and babysitting so that she could finish secondary school. After school, she joined a kindergarten as a teacher, although she dreamed of becoming a doctor. Her husband worked as an agronomist. Due to the difficult housing situation, the family moved to Česká Lípa, where her husband got a job at the company Pozemní stavby Liberec. Here Zdeňka Coufalová also started working in a kindergarten as a teacher and later as a deputy head teacher. However, her career was influenced by the fact that she never joined the Communist Party. Her family did not agree with the regime, she was in contact with dissidents, her husband practiced the faith, and they did not vote. In 1985, the witness was not admitted to study special education at university as politically unreliable. On the contrary, she was subjected to repeated „interrogations“ at the education office. In 1988, she accepted an offer to work as a director of a kindergarten in Noviny pod Ralskem. In January 1989, the family went to Všetaty to visit the grave of Jan Palach, but the police did not let them into the cemetery. They welcomed the Velvet Revolution with joy. Zdeňka Coufalová continued to work as a headmistress in a kindergarten and in 2008 she started studying school management at a university. In 2021 she was living in Česká Lípa.