"It was always organized by someone at those schools who was so active. It was agreed, that there would be a strike. I do not remember the date; it must have been after those August days in 1968. So we all got involved. We took it more as a joke, we played games, and we told each other who had which boyfriend. We didn't experience it, we weren't afraid, because we knew that nothing could happen to us."
"We were all the same. I had to comply with that, you could not say anything against that. That was hard. I would not even allow myself to do that, because I would not risk being fired from my job when I liked the job. What would I do? Because I did not specialize in any other field. All my life I worked just in the area of education."
"When there was an opportunity, whoever had a car drove them to a connection where the train was already working and the buses too. So people helped each other. At that time, people really held together a lot, because we were all surprised by what was happening, why our neighbors, whom we recognized as role models, had come here."
Jaroslava Kovářová was born on March 12, 1950 in Šumperk. From the age of three, she grew up with her parents and three siblings in Horní Slavkov near Karlovy Vary. As a child, she didn‘t realize that she lived in an unfree country, she went to Pionýr and enjoyed spending time with her friends. The invasion of Warsaw Pact troops tarnished her ideological image of the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1968, she took part in an anti-occupation strike at the secondary pedagogical school. She graduated and became a teacher in an orphanage and later a kindergarten teacher. She got married and raised a son. After the Velvet Revolution, she began to travel. In 2022, she lived in Horní Slavkov.
