Jana Stehlíková

* 1935

  • "On the 22nd, I walk down the street and see a newspaper - 'Occupation de Prague' and say: 'The capitalists don't know what to write, what they would write about Czechoslovakia, what was going on there. I had no idea that on August 21 in 1968 we were occupied by the Russians. So, I lived in Paris in 1968. Response in Paris… It was all behind the Iron Curtain and it went through the press, there were photos of the National Museum shot down, and that's about it, because the Parisians didn't care about what was going on in Prague. I had an opportunity... I met a few people there at that time. A translator Zvěřina, who had been in Paris for a long time and wanted to go to America, said: 'Come to America, don't go back to Czechoslovakia.' However, I was married, I was 33, I was old and I did not have the courage of the youth. In addition - the language barrier and I could barely speak French and now I would have to speak English. We learned only compulsory Russian at school, we didn't know another language. So, I refused that."

  • "Everything was on command. In the evening we were told that there would be no sauntering, that the bed time was at nine o'clock and that everyone has to sleep. No going to the bathroom at night, for example, that we are politically advanced and that we realize that we can't bother anyone. That's how we understood it and no one was sauntering, because everyone was hiding under a blanket, with tears, because we did not know how it would go on, because it was getting pretty awful. A wake-up command in the morning, from the gallery of the professor: 'Doves, get up, there will be a warming up!' So, each one of us stood by her bed. We stretched our arms out and sideways, we blinked, turned our heads from side to side, raised one leg and the other hand. And that was our warm-up. That was the beginning of the day. Then we lined up and went to school in pairs. During the march we were singing the songs that built socialism. A school care taker was waiting at school, he gave everyone a tin mug of milk or coffee and two dry rolls. We stood down the hall of the grammar school and there each one of us ate the rolls. Then the radio said, 'Comrades, break up into your classes, there will be political news.'"

  • "We experienced times of air raids, for example, because there was a war. My grandmother and I always ran to the end of the garden, and my grandfather built a temporary shelter there. It was a pit about two times two meters, high about a hundred and sixty. He somehow covered it up, he put some planks, the dirt and the turf on the ceiling, and we thought we were in a shelter and protected from those bombs. I didn't experience the bombing myself, but we saw it in every movie, in the editorial that was in front of every movie. There was always a victorious German army, there were bombings, houses fell, it was terrible. My cousin's grandmother experienced a raid and bombing in Vinohrady. It was just before the end of the war. I remember that people were literally rummaging through the ruins of the house and that I also took part as a little girl and that we only dug up her alarm clock, a few pieces of dishes and nothing else."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Batelov, 26.11.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 01:14:05
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

She learned about the occupation from a Parisian newspaper and chose to return instead of emigrating

A photo of Jana Stehlíková (then married Sluková) in the school index of the French language school in Paris, which she was attending in 1968
A photo of Jana Stehlíková (then married Sluková) in the school index of the French language school in Paris, which she was attending in 1968
zdroj: archive of the witness

Jana Stehlíková was born on August 9, 1935 in Prague, and she spent her childhood with her grandparents in Horní Počernice. The mother owned a millinery in Prague and commuted to her daughter. She graduated from a secondary pedagogical school, worked as an educator or a pioneer leader, and since 1960 she has been a primary school teacher. On August 18, 1968, she went on a one-year study visit to Paris, and learned about the occupation from the newspapers. She refused to emigrate and returned to Prague half a year earlier. She and her second husband raised two sons and moved to Batelov in the Vysočina region. After her husband‘s death in 2007, she began writing. In 2019, she was preparing a book about her friend, a graphic artist and a painter Ludmila Jiřincová, and she still lived in her house in Batelov.