"And I didn't get out of the building, there was a guy standing in front of the building, an officer with a machine gun, and he was speaking only Russian, of course, I knew Russian well at that time, I was lecturing in Russian for a time, because Russian experts as mineralogists used to come to the geological survey, so when I was accompanying them or lecturing, I was speaking Russian. We talked for maybe two hours, it was crazy, I was sweating on my back in terror because he was still holding the machine gun and there were tanks driving around Brno, I didn't even know it. In the morning, when I arrived, they were nowhere to be seen, but in the meantime they had already started driving around the city. He told me that they were here in Brno on the border with Germany and that we were occupied by German soldiers and that we were protected by them and that we had to look after ourselves and so on. And so I tried to convince him and by the fact that he was an officer it was better, if he was just some stupid soldier, I probably wouldn't be able to explain anything to him. So I drew a diagram for him, because there was just a sand road, I drew Europe, the Czechoslovak Republic, he told me where he was from, so I put in approximately where he was from, he wasn't from Moscow. I drew him Germany, where we have the border with Germany, where we have the border with Austria and where Brno is. Austria was still neutral at that time, then it opposed the GDR, but at that time it didn't speak out. He looked at it and said, that's impossible, they couldn't have told us that. So I finally agreed with him that if I loaded what I could into my car, he would still let me go."
"I just know that I said I wasn't going to run for City Hall, that I was sick of it from before. And in the evening, at eleven or half past eleven at night, Krajíček (Antonín Krajíček, then chairman of the People's Party) came and rang our bell, my parents were of course awake, because when the bell rang in the evening, my parents went to bed early, and he said, 'It's the third time for the round table, and the next day there must be a council.' That the roundtable just didn't agree on the three-way combination of what they were going to do at City Hall, that the only option was me. And I said no, there's no way I'm going to go to City Hall. My dad came up to me in his pajamas and said, 'You did so much for Boskovice already?' So Krajicek smiled, said thank you and closed the door. I just froze and said, okay, okay, but I only lasted there for one term, those four years."
"When our math teacher, who was the chairman of the local Communist Party, was dying, his wife called my mom and begged that he couldn't die, that he was just down on his soul, that he had been given the task of making sure I didn't pass my math graduation. From the Communist Party of the Czechoslovak Republic, that he had to do that. So I guess he was afraid he'd lose his job if he wasn't good, so he tried. Only he was unlucky, if he had done it in Russian it would have been worse, but I have always been a great student of mathematics, so the final exams were easy for me. He tormented me for over half an hour, until finally the chairman of the committee called to say that they were running out of time. But he said, she doesn't know this, she can't know this, and the chairman says to him, she's excellent, she's deserves a 1 (an A). So in the end then I got it for three (C)."
"I experienced the factory as a little girl and I was always going with him somewhere when something was going on, and then I would follow him (my father) to the puddle workshop where he was the untrained worker, and I would go to the canteen with him sometimes for lunch, so I called it our factory. When I had a vivid dream sometime after the age of ten that there was a fire in the drying room, so when I saw the fire about six months, a year later, it's still somewhere in my other dreams to this day, it was a shock as thunder to me. And it was on lunch break, so nobody was there. So I ran first to a neighbor who lived there, a priest, a monsignor, an old man, awfully smart and kind, so I flew to him, what should I do. He told me to go down to the porter's lodge and the boys would arrange something. So I ran down there to the gatehouse, that's what I remember."
Zdenka Božena Anna Kotková was born on 18 September 1942 in Brno as the first child of Zdenka and Jan Stehlik. Both parents were lawyers, the father worked after the war in the Antonín Jelínek & son leather factory in Velké Meziříčí. After 1948 the factory was nationalized and the father was forced to take on a job as an unskilled worker, but he continued to secretly provide free legal advice to people who needed it. After completing education at the primary and grammar school, she got to high school, where, according to a teacher‘s later confession, she was not allowed to graduate in mathematics at the matriculation exam by order of the Party. However, because of her knowledge, she completed another school - the Secondary Industrial School of Construction, majoring in surveying. While working as a chief surveyor in Jeseník, she graduated from the Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Civil Engineering, majoring in geodesy and cartography. In 1968, she negotiated with a Soviet officer the possibility of removing important company materials from the warehouse in the Svazarm building at Brno airport and then made the dangerous journey back to Jihlava, where she worked. In 1973 she married Ing. Stanislav Kotek, who in 1952 was sentenced as a juvenile for treason to two years without parole. While serving his sentence, he signed a cooperation agreement with the StB and was registered as an agent and later a confidant until 1980. They had three children, a son Petr (1970) and twins Blanka and Vladan (1975), who unfortunately died during a complicated birth. Zdenka Kotková worked in various companies as a surveyor and wrote a professional publication, Guidelines for Landslides. During the 1989 Revolution she took part in the demonstration on Wenceslas Square and met the people who were behind the restoration of Junák. She herself immediately became actively involved in the activities of the Scout organization. In 1990, after the elections, she worked as a secretary of the Municipal Office in Boskovice. Nowadays (2021) she continues to help as an administrative force for the Scout Centre and the Union of Gardeners.
