Hana Moravová

* 1935

  • "He collaborated because he was the mayor of Lysá and he was worried about the people, he cared about them not getting harmed. So he was playing to be on good terms with the Germans. As soon as the German signs started to be erased, our Popeye took his stepladder and started to erase it as well. They picked him up, took him to the summer training ground, and wanted to shoot him. So my dad flew to get Dr. Tichy, he then went to the summer training ground, and saved my brother." - "And did they shoot anyone there?" - "No. I don't know if any other boys were involved, but if there were, doctor Tichý saved them."

  • "The director's name was Hrabal. I asked for a recommendation for college - I had straight A's all through high school and only two B's in math and physics. He taught philosophy and told me that if there was a better grade than an A, he would give it to me. So I got a perfect grade from him in philosophy. But when my final exams were over and he was going to give me a recommendation for university, he started to blame me for living in a house on the square. That kind of crap. He wasn't a communist. He was just playing it because his brother was a rich peasant - in those days they called them 'kulak' - and he had to watch his mouth a lot. That's why he was like that to us. But as soon as we finished, he got kicked out of the school. That was in the fifties."

  • "But then came 1956, the events in Hungary, and I reacted peculiarly while reading the newspapers. Two comrades were working with me in the office - women unionists, and they didn't like it and told the director. We had a workers' director - it was the fashion then. He was a trained carpenter and was the director of a light bulb factory! He called me in and said I needed to learn to get along with the working class, so he transferred me to the assembly line. Graduated or not. So I worked shifts, also from two to ten in the evening. There was a train from Libeň at 10:30 in the evening, and I commuted home to Lysá nad Labem every day."

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    Praha, 16.01.2023

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    Praha, 23.01.2023

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You need to get along with the working class, they told her, and sent her to the assembly line

Hana Moravová playing a theatre role
Hana Moravová playing a theatre role
zdroj: Hana Moravová’s personal archive

Hana Moravová, née Merunková, was born on the 9th of March 1935 in Lysá nad Labem as the fourth child of the confectioner Josef and his wife Růžena Merunková, née Martínková. They had five children, the firstborn was Josef in 1925, and the last one was Růžena in 1940. The family lived in a house on Bedřich Hrozný Square, where her dad built and set up a confectionery workshop with a shop in the 1920s. Hana Moravová is a contemporary witness of life during the Protectorate in Lysá nad Labem, where she attended the municipal and town school. She remembers the running of the confectionery, the school, the Jewish inhabitants, and how at the very end of the war in May 1945, the mayor František Tichý saved her brother from being shot by the Germans. In 1945, her father‘s confectionery was transferred to a cooperative. Josef Merunka died in 1948 at the age of only 53 from heart disease. Hana Moravová graduated from grammar school in Nymburk in 1952, but because of her „entrepreneurial origin,“ she was not recommended for university and had to choose one of three possible jobs. She worked in an office at Tesla in Libeň. In 1956, she reacted positively to the attempted revolution in Hungary and was reassigned to the assembly line as punishment. In the 1950s and 1960s, she was an actress in the Tyl amateur theatre in Lysá nad Labem, but she also performed in the Máj theatre in Prague and sang with a jazz dance group in Nymburk. She tried her luck at DAMU (theater university), but her first failure in the entrance exams discouraged her. She brought her younger sister Růžena Merunková to a professional acting career when she prepared and brought her to audition for the E. F. Burian Theatre. She worked in Prague‘s Konstruktiva and from the mid-1970s as a clerk at the Ministry of Fuel and Energy, where she worked until 1989. She was married twice and raised a daughter Iva.