„I remember that awful feeling. Because at that time, the occupation happened in August, and I had a temp job, illegally. Because I was not fifteen yet, so I worked illegally in Černovír in a grocery. I shelved the goods. And I remember that on the twenty-first, I went to work and that I got, like, a totally absurd feeling that the war was about to start. Because there in Černovír, I called them grannies but they were women in their middle age or older, they stood there with carts, and they would buy quantities of flour, sugar, salt. I had hard time reshelving them. And, simply, I, like, know, that then, that sorta feeling I had… And everyone said that there will be war. And I know that for me, the feeling was very stressful. That I had no clue whether I would be able to leave the shop normally or whether something was bound to happen. And then I remember that the next day, a tank stood at the corner of our street with the cannon aimed right at our windows. And I know that I was very angry inside.”
„Every new text had to be submitted to the ideology department for approval. Comrades ideologues read it and started crossing out words which they found too relaxed, too critical, satirical, unsuitable, anything that the public could interpret differently. So they got the text all crossed out and they had to accept the deletions and they had to play it without.”
„That normalisation was different. There were, like, the same aspects of the limits but it was more sophisticated, more thought out, that manipulation. Those schematic games like recruitment or building brighter future, those did not appear any more. However, obviously, there were games which had a certain scheme and which were focused on the society, they were a bit similar to today’s TV series. This sort of everyday community which helped the public to forget that they live in absence of freedom and that, they actually showed how everyone is doing well.”
Tatjana Lazorčáková was born on the 1st of June in 1954 in Šumperk. Her Parents, Otto and Zdenka Ficner, came from different backgrounds. Otto was the son of one of the founding members of the Communist Party in Zábřeh, Zdenka’s family were businesspeople and Evangelical Christians. Otto Ficner joined the reformists during the Prague Spring of 1968 and as a result, he was expelled from the party during the normalisation background checks. It affected his daughter as well. She ranked 2nd in the entrance exams to the Faculty of Arts of the Olomouc University but she got a notice that she was not accepted for study. Thanks to her father’s involvement and a subsequent appeal, she was accepted at the end. At the university, she encountered the beginning of the normalisation – the lectures of notable teachers were gradually replaced by ideological babble. As a student, she played in the HaDivadlo in Prostějov and in the amateur troupe of the Oldřich Stibor Theatre in Olomouc. She wrote theatre reviews, she worked as an appointee for culture. In 1990, she accepted the offer to teach at the newly opened depatment of literature, theatre and film at the Faculty of Arts in Olomouc. She taught at the university at the time of recording her interview in 2020.
