Hana Pangrácová

* 1938

  • "For example, I had experience with stop states, they don't even talk about it much. Back then, after the 1968, all the people who did not agree with the occupation were fired or reassigned. And those people couldn't get a job because there was a ban on hiring new workers. And I happened to be on maternity leave, which I clumsily did by terminating my employment, and then I couldn't find a place when I wanted to go to work. It just so happened that one of my friends went to maternity leave and I replaced her there, so I could go to work."

  • "My experience was such a pointless one, but it happened that we went to Hostivar on foot for a trip and there was a new sign of the Czech Tourist Club, the cycle route Vienna, 348 kilometres, or whatever it was. And that was my greatest experience, because to Vienna, right, one needed travel clause... Just problems. Not that I would go there on that bike, even though I rode a bike a lot back then, but the possibility to just go there, well, it was beyond real. And then we had a tour, a bus tour with a gentleman who was an emigrant and drove us around the border, where they went to see the Czech Republic. They always went on a trip to the border on Sundays and went to have a look. So, he was also over the moon.”

  • "I still remembered how we went to the apprenticeship, it was in the year 1953, so it was so rough. And up on that classroom door there was a big poster saying: We are comrades, we address each other as comrades and we salute each other with respect to work. That was unforgettable, because before we worked in that research institute for pharmacy and biochemistry, no one cooperated there. But I transferred to the Institute of Radioisotopes in 1960, and there it was. There, the boss even said to me: 'Here we call each other comrades, Ms. comrade. And not Mr. Doctor and Ms. Engineer. Comrades!'"

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    Praha, 28.02.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 01:04:45
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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Czechoslovakia was a prison, albeit with beautiful nature, but still a prison

Wedding photo from 1959
Wedding photo from 1959
photo: Archiv pamětnice

Hana Pangrácová, née Pospíšilová, was born on February 16, 1938 in Prague as the first child of the Pospíšil family, and her brother was born five years later. Father Bohumil was a master carpenter and ran his own carpentry workshop, mother Vlasta worked as a maid and later a housekeeper on Letná, where the family moved from Strossmayer Square. Hana remembers the bombing of Prague by the Allies in the spring of 1945. As a seven-year-old, she experienced the Prague uprising and liberation by the Soviet army, when Nazi flags were torn down in the city and German women had to clear rubble and barricades. After the war, she started school, and even though she got all A’s, she didn’t get into a technical school. The communists confiscated her father’s carpentry workshop, so as the daughter of a tradesman, she was not allowed to study, just like her brother. In 1953, she began training as a research laboratory technician and worked first in the pharmacy research institute, and from 1960 in the radioisotope research institute. She finally got her high school diploma in the evening industrial school. She got married in 1959, and she and her husband raised two sons. In August 1968, she and her children were on recreation in Rokytnica nad Jizerou when they received news of the occupation of the country by Warsaw Pact troops. They extended their stay and waited for the situation in Prague to calm down. Even after returning, however, they found Soviet patrols in the streets with small cannons aimed at their windows. She recalls the difficulty of finding a job after background checks in the early 1970s, when she was returning from maternity leave. In November 1989, the whole family happily participated in the demonstrations against the communist regime, the son was right on Národní třída, she and her husband went straight from work to Wenceslas Square. She soon took advantage of the open borders and attempted to travel and get to know countries that she had not been allowed to visit for over forty years. In 2022, she lived in Prague.