"See, to get permission to go to the archives, I needed a stamp from the history professors at the Faculty of Arts, and everyone was afraid. They were scared, as I was French, and so on. I didn't get it. But one, already fired, historian got it, and she worked a little bit... I don't know if she was at the faculty, but she was at the Academy of Sciences. She was actually doing demographic history. She knew a friend of my dad's who also did demography, and she used to send him articles. That friend of my dad's gave me her contact information. I called her, desperate, sometime in February and said I'd been here since October. We met up. She was wonderful, Dr. Pavla Horská Vrbová. She's excellent. She said, 'I'll try through my friends' - and she actually got it for me, but only in June. My scholarship was ending. They extended it, that was the reason, for a year. Then I started going to the Prague City Archives, the one in Karmelitská Street, and various archives, and I found various things. More like cultural. Speaking of the Národní listy newspaper, I put the image of France in Národní listy, in the press, together. It was like 120 pages of what was needed."
"Later on, more of us said we wanted to come back to understand living behind the Iron Curtain better. Just a little bit better - to get a deeper understanding of the 'other' Europe from our point of view. Western Europe also was the 'other' Europe for the people here. So I enrolled in history at the Sorbonne in the fall of '69 because I couldn't go any further in Orleans, and I enrolled in Czech as well. I wasn't the only one; there were more of us. My sister Elizabeth also enrolled, so we were together, and I also started learning Czech because we thought it would be good to go back afterwards either for graduate school to get our Ph.D. or for our thesis. You know, to choose a graduation thesis, or master's thesis, topic that would allow us to go back to Prague. We learned reciprocal scholarships were available, which were reinstated in '67 I think, and there were fourteen of them between Czechoslovakia and France. Fourteen students could go with that scholarship, but they needed a really solid reason to do that. It seemed quite obvious to us that we had to have at least a Czech language exam."
"Yes, we had stuff to do. At that time there were still historians who had taught at the faculty before and didn't have to leave, who hadn't been kicked out of the faculty. They gave us some seminars in French mostly, or in English, I don't recall, and especially for all our tours. We also went to Kutná Hora, to (České) Budějovice and South Bohemia. Of course we went to a monastery too. We were always guided by one rare lady, Dr. Jiřina Joachimová Votočková, who was a long-time friend of the family of one of the assistant professors, and she actually introduced us to Czech history. She was Josef Jungmann's great-great-granddaughter. They wre such an old Prague family. She couldn't publish from 1948 but she was very brave. I saw her a lot then; we liked each other a lot when I came back here."
"And then we lived here in this timeless state of sorts. Nothing can ever change, with the Soviet Union forever and ever, and never otherwise, which is a terrible pleonasm, because - what is forever, that it can never be otherwise? But it did collapse. It started here. November 17th. At the College of Economics, the students, everything... You know what happened? That was during weekend. November 17th was a Friday, but I went to school on Monday. All of a sudden the students that I had, who were mostly from foreign trade, they were all in SSM, because otherwise they wouldn't have gotten in. And they were like caught in this web we were all trapped in as well, and suddenly they got their own point of view. They suddenly developed... not theirs... but this straightforward, direct point of view. They were amazing, these students, but they couldn't do anything... I couldn't do anything in college then. I could only teach them what was in textbooks, I couldn't bring any literature, nothing. What was important was what I said. Yes, they had to know languages, but everything was controlled. So all of a sudden, that broke down. Amazing, it was just amazing. But the most amazing thing for me was the young people, they regained this fresh point of view and also hope and everything."
"But once I was with this other French girl, not Suzette, another one who didn't stay afterwards... somewhere near Bartolomějská street. I won't tell you now exactly where it was. We were having coffee and an officer came to sit with us who would always... well, one of them. And he was very friendly, he wanted to pay our bill and I said, 'No, sorry, I'm going away.' I just resented it. I don't know how to say it. Guardian angel, I thought. I didn't want anything to do with them. They tried, but I left. I didn't even want to talk to them in a friendly way, because I just didn't trust them. And I saw him in one case being terribly, terribly rude to an Englishman who was doing something... I don't know what happened. I was waiting there and he was rough with him... I could see they were terrible types, these people. So my husband... A couple of times, but he didn't know how to... And they always wanted to, but then they didn't call him back because they always wanted him to sign that he wouldn't talk to anybody about it. But the husband always said, 'But I have to talk to my wife about it, it concerns her. I can't sign that for you. I won't sign that.' And so they let him go. But several times.. all the time... They left me alone, because I was French, right. That was a lecturing position, but otherwise, all the time, of course."
"Well, it was a discovery. We discovered not just Prague, but the life behind the Iron Curtain as well Europe so close and yet so distant. Close because we are culturally close, because we have similar... But this curtain, it was quite a division. And I remember we were at the border for two or three hours. They were checking everything and everything... even though it was in '69. No, I'm wrong. That was later. In '69 it was faster, it was still in March or something, the Prague Spring was still reverberating. I'm wrong, it was after that. But I remember entering Prague. That was in the evening, it was at dusk, not dark, not much light in those streets. Everything was a bit grey, a bit mysterious. We stopped in front of the Faculty of Philosophy, where the students of history were waiting for us, but also philosophy, all those who had signed up... philologists, French students too. The journey was amazing. We stayed with students, it was still possible in 69. I stayed with a very nice family. Both girls were studying... no, the older one, Jarmila, was studying French, I think the other one, Pavla, was doing something else. I don't remember. But somebody was in another field and so on. There were special seminars for us, because there were still many historians who would be fired later. They were still teaching there, they forced them to leave only during the normalization. So they did seminars for us, I don't know if it was in French or English, I don't remember what it was. But there were seminars and we were invited... by those students to see the last Karel Kryl concert. It was in the big auditorium at the Faculty of Philosophy. I don't know if it was March or April '69, but it was at that time. And those students marched with us in the streets and taught us songs. The first words in Czech: "Go home, Ivan, Natasha is waiting for you..."
Anne-Marie Páleníčková, née Ducreux, was born on 12 August 1950 in Caen, France, into a traditional Catholic family. Since her childhood, she and Marie-Elizabeth, her twin sister, read avidly, played the piano and were interested in Russian literature. Anne-Marie studied history and geography. A student trip to Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1969 was decisive for both her life and career. During the Prague Spring she had the opportunity to experience life behind the Iron Curtain, the euphoric atmosphere of political change and the cultural richness of Central Europe. Although she spent a short time in Prague, this trip changed her life. Upon her return, she began to study Czech. She met her later husband, Zdeněk Páleníček, a pianist from a musical family, and after their marriage they decided to stay in Czechoslovakia. As a French woman, she had constant problems with the StB during the so-called Normalisation period, but was protected by the fact that she was in contact with the French embassy. She had contacts with dissident and Catholic circles and transported shipment of Bibles from France to Prague. Anne-Marie Páleníčková taught French at the Language School, later at the University of Economics in Prague, and after 1989 at the French Gymnasium and the French Lyceum. She translated Bohumil Hrabal‘s book Too Noisy Solitude into French during the Normalisation period and later books by Tomáš Halík. She was active in the community of the Work of Mary and was in contact with the Little Sisters of Jesus. She is still active in the Association of St. Ludmila in Tetín, where she lives. She is a recipient of the French Order of Academic Palms.
Arboretum les Barres, a group photo of university of forestry students, her father, Pierre Ducreux, in the middle, his brother, Georges-Henri, standing in front of him with a small hunting horn, around 1960
Arboretum les Barres, a group photo of university of forestry students, her father, Pierre Ducreux, in the middle, his brother, Georges-Henri, standing in front of him with a small hunting horn, around 1960
Anne-Marie Páleníček in the middle, at the Élysée Palace, with students and professors from the French department of the Jan Neruda Grammar School in Prague and Lycée Louis le Grand and the Czech ambassador before lunch with Mrs. Chirac, December 2001
Anne-Marie Páleníček in the middle, at the Élysée Palace, with students and professors from the French department of the Jan Neruda Grammar School in Prague and Lycée Louis le Grand and the Czech ambassador before lunch with Mrs. Chirac, December 2001
