“So, one of my colleagues gave me a calendar from April ’69. So without even looking at it, yeah, you know, I don’t know if I would have even noticed anything about it, I hung it up there some time in April ’77, which was a big mistake. If it’d been earlier, it might have been such a problem. And on 30 April Miloš Disman was born, who brought up such excellent children like Karel Kyncl and Pavel Kohout. So someone took it up to the director and it was really a big deal. They interrogated me upstairs about who had given it me, and I just started crying. I mean, I didn’t want to betray my colleague, so what was I supposed to do... In the end it worked out okay, except for the fact that till eighty-nine I was denied any sort of promotion, I didn’t get a single extra crown for those whole twelve years. But I was really lucky that that officer there was, he was sort of lenient. The other one at the time was at a spa retreat for three months. Later on I got word from my colleague – not till eighty-nine – that the other one would have thrown me out of there within an hour. But, hey, I didn’t mean to put it up. But the funniest part of it was that they let me keep the notice board because the head supervisor who oversaw those notice boards was actually my boss.”
“So I was at home, because I had a six-year-old, you know. But I remember that we weren’t asleep for some reason, maybe we’d already heard the airplanes, I don’t know. We turned on the radio and heard Hoffmann saying that people should not panic and nothing was going on and so on. So, even before heading into work that morning, we already knew that it was simply the end. I remember one very unpleasant thing: When we were leaving from Ústí there were Russian tanks rolling over and crushing the newly built road, I mean really crushing it, so much that it wasn’t fixed till two years later. But I remember, I can still remember a few other things: we were travelling during the week when they took Dubček and the rest to Russia, we went to go help out with the hops. And at the hops fields we were listening to radios you know and there was some Soviet soldier with a tank there, he circled around us two or three times, I can say that we really were very afraid.”
Eva Hozmanová was born on 21 July 1941 v Pardubice. She was a witness to the results of the Nejedlý school reforms. She spent the majority of her life working for North Bohemian Chemical Works. In 1968 she witnessed the arrival of Soviet tanks connected to the invasion of Warsaw Pact armies into Czechoslovakia. In 1977 she was denied being promoted at work as a punishment for hanging up an anti-communist calendar. On 26 November 1989 she took part in the demonstrations in Prague at Letná. On 27 November 1989 she took part in a general strike in Lovosice. On 30 November she co-founded the Civic Forum in Lovosice. She was a member of the first post-November local government in Lovosice from 1990 until 1994. From 1991 to 2002 she served as the chairperson of the commission for culture, schools, and sport. From 1991 to 1996 she collaborated on the cable radio broadcast of the Independent Lovosice Weekly. She became a member of the civic group Muzeum Lovosicka. She continues to live in Lovosice and contribute to the city’s cultural and civic life.
