"Well, when I had this exhibition in the tower in Malinec, they called me, I don't know, after a week, after 14 days, for some... There was the Communist Party, and they called me in for an interview, and they told me that they were forbidding me... So there was also a State Security officer who was investigating me in the Sparta - so they said, 'Don't you dare, you don't have to have a daughter, you don't have to live here and you can be arrested. Everything will work out if you do any more shows.' Well, they just threatened me. I was doing my own thing anyway, so I haven't exhibited since 1982. It wasn't that bad."
"After that Sparta game, where I was chased by those stupid State Security officers, it was terrible. They broke into my studio several times and broke into my studio - I was always sent an invitation to go somewhere - and they were digging around. You know how it makes you angry when somebody digs in your drawings or something. They got in there, I don't know how, just through a lock, a padlock, they were very clever. So then at the Sparta, they took me in for questioning, and three days later they let me go. Then how many times they stopped me when I was driving at night. And there I was, somewhere on a slope, wondering whether the brakes would hold, whether the handbrake would hold, and they were pushing against the car — I was praying it wouldn't give out. Then they made me do things like manually inflate the spare tire at night, in an evening dress, on my way back from a concert — it wasn’t easy. They did things like that to me."
"Dad designed the whole listening device, the antenna system, at General Paleček's place. They had the whole roof as an antenna, because it was on the highest point on the Andělky - that's where dad apparently found the best reception. So they were bugging the Germans, too, they knew everything completely. That's what dad used to say, too, when somebody said we had bad intelligence, he said we had the best in Europe, because they knew everything, actually. It was just a question of whether the politicians would listen to that. So dad knew absolutely everything, that's what I said, that Kanaris then in '39 tried to get him to take his side. Well, he stayed here, they were supposed to leave for England with Moravec, that 14th of March. They had passports, I gave the passports to the Army Museum. My mother had an echo that my grandfather and grandmother, our grandparents, were going to be executed, so she didn't want to leave. So they didn't leave. Dad, of course, complied with her wish."
Jana Budíková was born on June 12, 1946 in Prague, Vinohrady, to Dagmar and Jan Budík. Her father was a prominent figure in the Czechoslovak radio telegraph scene and a participant in the anti-Nazi resistance. From December 1939 he was imprisoned in German dungeons. He was liberated in the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the communist takeover, his father lost his job at the Ministry of the Interior and the family lost their official apartment in Vinohrady. They moved to her grandparents’ villa in Prague’s Smíchov district, where Jana Budíková lived all her life. In 1965-1971 she studied at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU) and the University of Applied Arts (UMPRUM) in Prague. In the following years she made a living as a graphic artist. In 1976 she married Aleš Klátil, with whom she had a daughter, Adéla. As one of the curators of an exhibition called “Encounter”, held in the tennis courts of the TJ Sparta in 1982, she came under the radar of State Security (StB) and was interrogated. After the Velvet Revolution, she devoted herself to her work and taught at the Secondary School of Graphic Arts in Prague. In 2024 she was still living in Smíchov, Prague.
