"Because we felt, you know, under socialism, that even the conservation was not being done quite as well as it could be done, so we were very much looking forward to it being good, that if the conservationist says you can't demolish this, it won't be demolished and that's how it needs to be fixed. So that the monuments would be preserved as evidence of that past, so that we could understand how people maybe used to live and things like that, because it was just important. It was important to me too. And suddenly in the conservation, at least in Pardubice, where I worked, the director of the conservation became a man who had previously built power stations. So suddenly, after the revolution, when you had so much desire to do it perfectly, well, and so when a person who had built power plants before and had not repaired monuments became your boss or director, it was a terrible realization for me and such a shock..."
"When I was studying at university, I went to France for three weeks. It was just a coincidence, normally it was difficult to get to Western Europe. And there you suddenly realised how we were always getting these ideas drilled into us about how crazy it is there and how people don't have jobs and how angry they are. It just wasn't like that. It was... we just got to know a different world, we got to know that it doesn't have to be as grey as it is here. And the interesting thing was that when we were getting the papers to go to France, the police asked us if we wanted to go from here or from the West, in France. They were already counting on the fact that we would stay there, that we would emigrate."
"There are mountains around, it's Beskydy and there are mountains. When you are born in the mountains, I found that out during my life, you don't feel quite comfortable on the plain. I also lived in Pardubice for ten years, and even though at the beginning it was an interesting place for me, after a while I found out that I didn't feel comfortable there, that the mountains were very important for me. The town of Vsetín is actually the centre of Wallachia, and as a child I was... I'm just at home there. Imagine that even today, when I go to Vsetín after x years, I just go home, even though I haven't lived there since I was nineteen."
Jana Pavlíková, née Životská, was born on 26 January 1956 in Vsetín. She graduated from the grammar school and in 1975 she started to study history and art history at the university in Brno. During her studies she managed to travel to France. In 1980, she started to work as a conservationist in Pardubice. After the Velvet Revolution, she succeeded in a selection procedure and became the director of the castle in Frýdlant. She still works at the castle today.
