"You know what, I misspoke, I wasn't in jail, I was in interrogation custody. And that interrogation - it was on Novosvetská Street, that's actually the building that is considered one of the jewels of Weinwurm's architecture. I didn't know that at the time, of course. But anyway, they were looking, they behaved relatively politely, because I just kept saying that I knew him, that he lived nearby, that he was a young man, that it was terrible. I was just saying it from this human point of view. But those policemen, too, were human beings. So again, not everybody was so indoctrinated. And at that time many people still admitted many things. Well, so they were threatening, of course, if I was aware of it, they were going to kick me out of school and so on. Well, all of this. Well in that tone it went. So they didn't find any connections, well so like that they just kept me there in all sorts of ways and kept coming back to the same thing."
"I attributed many of the distortions in interpersonal relationships and in everyday life to external barriers, especially political ones. And so, as part of my sobering up, very early on - we began to perceive that it is not enough to remove those external barriers, that those deformations are there, that it is a question of a mentality that extends far deeper than those decades of communism. It all started to manifest gradually, and as a sociologist, I observed that and noted it with shame, too, because it was only then that I realized that I didn't actually know our society at all in the way it was. Whether it was those nationalistic outbursts or anti-Semitism. All this just, when it ... but then also other things around, say, gender relations and things like that. A lot of taboo things - particularly swept under the carpet, suddenly appeared and suddenly it had a huge sort of explosive force to it, destructive I would go so far as to say. So it was such a... And the other thing, that was such a great sobering of my naivety, was that when we started doing this public opinion research, my strong motivation was such a conviction that if there was natural feedback from the public to the politicians in society, it would actually lead to better behaviour of those politicians, to better political decisions, that it would have a positive effect. And so in that respect, the great feeling of powerlessness, the greatest feeling, I experienced at the time when the debates on the state system started and when we clearly documented, based on our research, because we were focused on this topic, clearly documented that on the one hand the people in Slovakia, but also in the Czech Republic - Czech colleagues researched that and we also found out in the Czechoslovak surveys we were working on- that they want to keep the state, on the other hand they have vague ideas about what attributes that common state should have and furthermore that there is a huge space for politicians to obfuscate how to bring them to the solution that suits them best."
"Of course, we endured that occupation with difficulties, as such ... also my brother, whom I mentioned, who was actually graduating from high school at that time and then slowly preparing to attend university. So we lived opposite the Russian Consulate, on the other side, so from the back. So our Ivan, as soon as the occupation just started, put up a black flag. At that time, those houses still had those... So our neighbour was terribly afraid that the Soviets would do something to us or so. But then, actually, when we were in the Tatra Mountains, for example, in the summer, with my father, and a bigger group of children and adults, our Ivan, he was very clever, he carved well, and he carved "Death to the occupiers", a Soviet star with a swastika and so on, on the hut. He wrote all our names there. So that was one thing. Somebody reported him. So that was the first thing. The second thing was that when it was the first anniversary of the occupation, I decided I was going to put flowers in front of the post office where they actually shot that Legner. Well, I picked a bouquet and I went to take it there. So anyway, of course, I didn't really anticipate it being there that much, but we knew that the police were pretty much on high alert at that time because it was anticipated that there would be some protests and so on. So I was there as an individual, but they locked me up, they took me, they kept me there until the morning. They were just interrogating, all sorts of things, looking for some kind of connection, to see if it was part of something bigger organised. It wasn't. So then they let me go. Well, and by that, actually, then, I was released because I was Takáčová. So somehow it was still there - my father wasn't in Prague anymore, but somehow I was excused. But these two things, what Ivan had written, the inscriptions and the fact that I put the flowers there, that was actually the impetus for my father to be dismissed from the job where he was working at the time. At that time he was working for a time as head of the office of the Slovak National Council. So that was actually kind of the end of my father's functioning."
“I was trying to do things that I thought were meaningful, that could contribute - to make something in society a little bit more humane, and it’s very much about the perception of freedom.”
Zora Bútorová was born on 17 January 1949 in Bratislava to Samuel Takáč and Magda, née Slukova. Both parents came from a nationalist protestant family. Her paternal grandmother was a member of Živena and her father belonged to the left-leaning intelligentsia associated with the Detvan association during the interwar period. At the time of Zora’s childhood, he was alternately superintendent of industry and trade and superintendent of light industry, and later superintendent of construction. Her mother worked from home as a translator. During her studies, Zora took up gymnastics. After graduating from high school in 1967, she started studying sociology at Comenius University in Bratislava. On the day of the first anniversary of the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, she was remanded in custody for laying flowers at the place where Peter Legner was shot in August 1968. Normalisation in the 1970s affected the family on her mother’s side. Pavol Ličko, the husband of her mother’s sister Marta, was imprisoned for smuggling Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer into Czechoslovakia. After graduation, she got a job at the Czechoslovak Labor Institute, and later joined Fedor Gal’s forecasting group, which focused on researching the future development of society in the field of labor, and since 1978 they have been forecasting the development of living standards. In 1978 she married her second husband Martin Bútor and her daughter Zuzka from her first marriage was joined by her son Ivan. After the Velvet Revolution, she worked at the Centre for Research of Social Problems at the KC VPN, and later at the Institute for Social Analysis at Comenius University. In 1993-1997 she was employed as a researcher for the Focus agency, then she co-founded the Institute for Public Issues, where she works to this day. Between 2000 and 2001, she lived alongside her husband-ambassador to the USA. Currently, in addition to her sociological research, she works at the University of Trnava.
