Jitka Frýdmanová

* 1954

  • "Officers had wives here, whole families came to see them. There was a whole Russian settlement in Milovice. The wives were showing off. They didn't work. They were big, fat, wrapped in fur and they used to buy just everything. They were allowed to send five-pound parcels home to Russia. I was a temp at Darex, it was a department store. I was in jewellery. And there were these sets, the professor will know, necklace, ring, earrings together. Like Czech garnets or something. They bought it by the pound. They bought five kilos and sent it to Russia because they had unlimited money. We fed them. We fed the army, which, of course, affected our economy. They were terribly unpleasant, they were showing off. I know that this Russian shouted that I should be speaking Russian. I was stubbornly speaking Czech. Of course, we all hated them. She shouted at me that she knew I was learning Russian, and I understood her, but I was playing dumb. They shopped like that, sent it on and sucked this country dry."

  • "Then the tanks left. Whether to Prague or to the forest, I don't know. The crew stayed here. My dad was quite brave, he organised petitions here for the Physical Education Union. I have a lot of material here, I'll show you later. There were petitions all over the country, everybody signed that we don't want them here, that it's against the Declaration of Human Rights and all that kind of stuff. Twice he even went to the woods with with a resolution that we don't want them. It was probably quite dangerous. And on top of that, every night he would disappear somewhere - he would spare us so we wouldn't know - always with a bucket, with lime, and some boys your age would come with him. He was a teacher, so some brave boys. And they wrote. At that time the whole republic was described: 'Go home, Ivan, Natasha is waiting for you', 'Moscow a thousand miles away'..."

  • "The worst thing for me was when we drove around Louny, I don't know if anyone knows around Louny. That's actually the Czech Central Highlands. You go along the edge of the hill, there's a ravine at the bottom, there's a hill and a curve at the top. And we were coming up and a tank came in front of us. There was a whole column of tanks. And it skidded to our side. So he straightened it out and now we were going and another tank was coming. The thought of falling into that ravine... I still remember that little girl's terror. Luckily, he negotiated it. So we got home all right."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 05.12.2025

    (audio)
    délka: 48:42
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Soviet soldiers were in Klánovice until the 1990s

Jitka Frýdmanová in her youth
Jitka Frýdmanová in her youth
zdroj: Archive of a witness

Jitka Frýdmanová, née Kinštová, was born on 9 October 1954 in Žatec. Her parents were teachers, and she and her younger brother grew up in a pedagogical environment that shaped her significantly. She remembers the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. Because of her father‘s activities during the occupation, Jitka Frýdmanová did not get into university, so after graduating from the Na Pražačce Gymnasium, she started working. After graduation, she took a job as an educator in an orphanage in Klánovice. Later she completed her secondary pedagogical school by distance learning. In 1977 she married and she and her husband had three children. She was a participant in the demonstrations during the Velvet Revolution. In the 1990s, she left her job at the orphanage, graduated from the Library Institute at the National Library and became the head of the library in Klánovice. She worked there until her retirement. In 2025 she lived in Klánovice, Prague.