Jiřina Pěčová

* 1940

  • "We had to sign that we agree with the entry of troops. And I said, 'But what should I write? I don't want to sign it.' And now I think my husband, who had to do it because he was a construction worker, was the only one in their group who didn't sign it. And now I know that his bosses said, 'But can we rely on you at work?' Because they didn't know how to get around it anymore. And he said, 'Of course.' So they transferred him to some minor construction for half a year or three quarters, and then they transferred him back. So that was also possible. And I consulted with him, so then I wrote in the questionnaire that I was a pacifist and that I was against any kind of violence. And nothing happened. Nobody told me anything, nobody forced me to do anything. So I don't know what the others wrote, we didn't share it much, I don't think."

  • "Then I started the eleven-grade school and attended it for three years. And since there was another school reform, we were leaving from the eighth grade, and then there were the so-called course students. So those studied for a year longer, and then they put all of us in the eleventh grade together. And that first year, the report card, that was a disaster. Because they were smarter, of course, they had that extra year. When we got that first year's load, I remember I got about four D's in the first trimester, although I had always been a straight-A student. That was quite a [...] then we somehow pulled through, but it was quite hard. And we had a headmistress there, Mrs. Klančíková, who was also a committed communist, and she didn't give me a recommendation because my grandfather was a capitalist. I wanted to be an X-ray technician at that time, so I was lucky I didn't get in because my career was going in a different direction. That's what I remember... This headmistress taught us Logic, which wasn't really her field, this subject, but I remember her outburst, which was very harsh. She was accusing us, and we didn't understand what for. And that was when the revolution in Hungary took place. So she threatened us if by chance we wanted to do something similar here [...], but we didn't know at all what was going on. And then, it turned out that she didn't even have a university degree and wasn't qualified to do this job, so she got fired. But then I saw her on the Radio, so..."

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    Praha , 31.03.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:47:12
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
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I‘ve never been afraid to speak my mind

Jiřina Pěčová, 1977
Jiřina Pěčová, 1977
zdroj: Witness archive

Jiřina Pěčová was born on 16 August 1940 in Prague. The family lived with her mother‘s parents in Vršovice, on the premises of the Eden amusement park. Her grandfather owned a dance hall and a haunted castle there, which they adapted for living purposes when the attractions began shutting down. Jiřina did not have a close relationship with her father, Josef Loukota; her mother, Václava, née Horáková, divorced him when she was five years old. The witness did not receive a recommendation for further studies after graduation, stating that her grandfather was a capitalist. She joined the Bratři v triku studio at Barrandov as a contourist. Later, she took a projectionist course and studied editing at the FAMU evening film school. She worked as an assistant editor and from 1980 as an editor. She contributed to a wide range of cartoons for which Czechoslovakia became famous even abroad. This also provided a supply of currency for the socialist state apparatus and therefore, less pressure during the normalisation period. Jiřina Pěčová never joined the Communist Party and did not sign an agreement with the entry of the occupying troops in August 1968. For her, working in the field of animated film was a lifelong pursuit, and she passed on her knowledge to students of FAMU and later UMPRUM in Prague. In 2022, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to animated film. At the time of filming (2023), she lived in Prague.