Stanislava Kulová

* 1951

  • "And one day I went to the library to borrow books and suddenly there was someone else and there was this little girl. And she said to me, 'They didn't have anybody to put in the library here, in the children's library, so they put me in there.' She, who had been locked up in a criminal prison, she was actually locked up with Milada Horáková, they were so very, if it was at that time in Pankrác, and she said to me, 'You know what, don't borrow the books here, wait until the kids leave.´ She opened the drawer and there she already had the books from the Christian Academy. She wasn't really worried, she was already, if, I guess they were smuggling all kinds of books. So they were just like, 'Wait and I'll lend you something better.' And that's when we started a friendship and I know she said many times, 'Wait here, I need you to write, I need a child's handwritten address here. I don't remember where it was. And now she's always like, 'Here, take the paper,' and now she's dictating to me: "We were on the blueberry patch, there were clouds, but it wasn't raining. The forecast is bad,´ and I was like, `Things like that,´ and some of them were so abstract that I was like, `What about that Tonička girl?´ And then after a while I realized that they were actually letters to the prison."

  • "And now the teacher always said to me, 'And you're going to stand in the front row and you're going to sing a solo here. Yeah, but all the kids have scarves, all the kids, and you're ruining it for us. You're ruining it for us because you sing well, but you don't have a pioneer scarf. And I said, 'But I'm never going to Pioneer because my parents don't want me to. And I know that the teacher always said, 'Do you understand why?' And I always said, 'Yes, I know why, my parents explained it to me.'"

  • "So this Father Jiří had a motorbike and so my dad dismantled the sign, bandaged his head and just went to Hradec to the bishop's office, there he picked up the Pastoral Letters and he distributed them around the diocese. And he said, 'I always rang the bell or knocked at the rectory, handed over the Pastoral's Letter and said, 'Don't ask me anything, I'm nobody.'"

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    Rajhrad, 28.11.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 03:26:54
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Without God‘s blessing, human effort is futile

Stanislava Kulová in the 1970s
Stanislava Kulová in the 1970s
zdroj: archive of the witness

Stanislava Kulová (nee Bodláková) was born on 18 October 1951 in Svratka, Vysočina, into a deeply religious family. Her father, František Bodlák, joined the resistance immediately after February 1948 and used a borrowed motorbike to distribute Pastoral‘s Letters in the surrounding parishes. Priests released from communist prisons found refuge with the Bodláks during the one-party rule. Mother Anežka Bodláková washed and cleaned their laundry, picked up their lice, cooked for them and hid their correspondence. At the age of two and a half, Stanislava suffered from severe cerebral palsy - because of her disability and walking on crutches, she was often the target of ridicule by her classmates. Because she had a bad report card and, as a girl from a Catholic family, a cadre profile, she enrolled at the Higher School of Economics in Trutnov - at the other end of the country, thinking that separation from her parents would remove her from their influence. Instead, in Jánské Lázně, where she lived in a dormitory, Stanislava met a political prisoner, Antonia, called Tonička, Hofmanová, with whom she struck up a lifelong friendship. During her adolescence, she then joined the Fokolarin group, which at that time included, for example, František Radkovský and Miloslav Vlk. In the first half of the 1970s, the Brno apartment of Stanislava Kulová and her husband Zdeněk became a centre for secret religious meetings, where lectures and masses were held. After her divorce in 1975, Stanislava was left alone with her two children and earned extra money by transcribing samizdat. In 1989, she signed and disseminated Several Sentences and a petition for religious freedom by the activist Augustin Navrátil. Throughout her life she worked as an accountant and, in the period after the Velvet Revolution, as a churchwarden at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Brno. She raised two children, Stanislava and Jiří. At the time of the interview, Stanislava Kulová lived in Rajhrad.