Eva Vopěnková

* 1947

  • "That when '89 was the year, I was working, as I said, in the Tatra, and the militia also had dressing rooms upstairs. Do you know who the militia was, the militiamen? And all of a sudden we saw that soldiers like from the army came and started to bring weapons and all that we had on that floor, that ammunition. And all this, it was there. We didn't know that at all. We knew that the militia had, they always called it in on the radio when they had some training or something, they called it in with a song, Over the burn, over the bloody woods. That song was always played, and now we could see the members that were next to us, that were in civilian clothes, already heading over there and going to some drill. So it was only then that we saw what kind of... I can't even do it, rifles of course, machine guns and all that and we didn't even know we had that upstairs."

  • "Back in '68, in August, because they knew I liked to paint, they would come to me to paint some posters, so I would paint like... like a big one like a butt and a big army boot next to it, like all the people would send the soldiers away. Well, and then, after that passed, people would come up to me again and say, 'Don't worry, don't worry, we've destroyed those posters. Don't worry, nothing will happen to you.' Because then they were looking for who drew it, who wrote it. People started showing up, people at work, college students, lawyers who had lost their jobs, and suddenly I saw them there in the workshop at the lathe."

  • "When I was about five or four years old, it was always the May Day parade, and there were always huge poster pictures of Marx and Engels and stuff. And that was always, because I lived in a dairy in a factory, so that's where it was, that's where they used to get the workers for the parade. Well, and they always put it away somewhere. And because I was a kid and I didn't like the Marx being bearded, so I tore it up with a stick. They put it away after the parade, they put it away at the doorman's place somehow. Well, and I got in there as a kid and damaged it, so it became a big investigation as to who did it, because they were afraid it was some kind of anti-state. When it was revealed that I had done it, they rather made fun of it."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Kolín, 12.03.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 47:23
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I didn‘t like Marx - he was so bearded, so I damaged a picture of him with a stick

Eva Vopěnková in 1969
Eva Vopěnková in 1969
zdroj: archive of the witness

Eva Vopěnková was born on August 13, 1947 in Kolín. Her uncle František Skuhra worked in the personal guard of President Masaryk during the First Republic. Because of this and because of her father‘s refusal to join the Communist Party, she was not admitted to high school. She had to spend a year studying and then she was allowed to enter the industrial high school. All her life she worked as a designer in Tatra. After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, she created anti-occupation posters. After the Velvet Revolution she devoted herself to painting and playing the violin in the philharmonic orchestra. In 2024 she lived in Kolín.