“There was a small party, but nothing too big, that wasn’t even possible there. We were relaxed, played the ‘Do not get angry’ game, one article wrote about that. It’ funny that everyone here was rooting for us and there we were just calmly playing our game. We got a couple of Pilsner beers as a business gift, so we celebrated a little bit, but not too much. We didn’t even have the strength to party, that’s how exhausting it had been. We went to watch other sports too, I remember Zaremba, that was a bright moment.”
“Unfortunately, we had never talked about it much (with parents). I know that they used to take me to a shelter because I was born in 1944 and the liberation was in 1945. I know that it was a tough life, there wasn’t much to eat, I remember that. My mother used to go to the countryside to see our relatives who would help us and bring us food. I have vague memories of that, but nothing else much. It was a bad time, we didn’t grow up wealthy or in a good environment, on the contrary. We didn’t admit it to ourselves much.”
“I remember that we used to go to Yugoslavia with our ice-hockey friends to mingle with the “rukomet” (women handball players). We went on vacation there, the whole Slavia crew with their children. That’s where we learned about the Warsaw Pact Invasion and we simply couldn’t believe it. We had no connection, there were no phones, no Facebook and our local Yugoslav friends came to visit us and told us that the Soviet Army had come to Czechoslovakia. We didn’t want to believe it and thought they had been joking. They took us to a TV where we saw the footage and only then we really knew they hadn’t lied and that we had been occupied. We then had to stay there about a month longer because we couldn’t get back to Prague. Then we took a charter aircraft and even a train through Vienna, it was hard getting back to Czechia.”
Jarmila Králíčková, née Bejlková, was born May 11, 1944 in Prague into a family of a council man and an actress. She was brought up mainly by her grandmother and her older sisters. Through athletics she got to play ice hockey in the Slavia Praha Hockey Club where she then played as a goalie between the years 1957 and 1989. She graduated in 1961 from the Sanytrová general education high school. She got married soon after and gave birth to her son Petr. She won 14 titles of a champion with Slavia and a bronze medal at the 1976 IIHF European Cup. She was a member of the Czechoslovak national team from 1965 and gained 6th place at the 1978 Women‘s Hockey World Cup in Madrid. The Czechoslovak national team originally didn’t qualify for the Moscow 1980 Olympic Games, but the positions came along after the announcement of Western countries’ boycott of the games and the Czechoslovak team won a historic silver medal. Jarmila Králíčková ended her national team career after the Olympic Games and got divorced soon after. During her sports career she was employed in Slavia Sport (1968-1973) and also occupied various positions in the Czech central committee of the Czechoslovak Sports Association up until 1993. She then worked in the technical administration of the University of Economics, Prague in Jižní Město until 2013. Today she is retired.
