Jiří Degl

“Have you been often sick because of the terrible flat?” – “We were. I used to have fevers all the time. For example, I could not attend school for half a year. My brother’s kidneys were completely destroyed, I had my bladder impacted and I had chronic angina pectoris. Even when we move back to Pilsen, when I was in the 8th grade, I did not go to school. I was at home receiving treatment. In Plzenec, I did not go to school due to the fevers either. I used to have terrible fevers.” – “Nevertheless you managed school fairly well…” – “I did not study very well, I was not interested in that.” – “But you managed to complete secondary education, in the end…” – “I did, yes…”

“We invited him over. It was in the summer, I had terrible fevers, my brother as well. The doctor said: ’Mrs. Deglová, take the boys and bring them to Pilsen. In this summer house they suffer, they should not be here.’ Mum told him that this is where we lived but he could not believe that and thought that she is making fun of him. He saw that there was water pouring from the ceiling and that the plaster was falling down the wall. My mother was very sensitive and she started crying because he did not believe her. One day in November, there was terrible rain and I was sitting under a plastic cover. My mother called him over and he came. When he saw us, he started crying: ‘Jesus Christ, I am very sorry, I did not know that you really lived here, the communist have really chased you out in here.’ My mother told him that it was the third year that we lived there. He got very angry, that it was terrible, that we could not be there. That us children, we would get sick because there was mould and it would impacts our lungs. He recommended my mum to invite over someone from the health inspection in Rokycany, which she did. The doctor confirmed everything she found in the house: mould, no access to water, smell at night, no light in the kitchen, only an opening towards the yard. She wrote us a recommendation and that helped us because then we could move back to Pilsen. She was really shocked, the doctor.”

“It happened on 5 June 1953. My father worked as a locksmith in Škoda. I came back from school, my brother was not even going to school yet, my mum was at home. Some man came around and brought my mother a green envelope. He said: ‘You will probably be moving out.‘ He wanted her to sign some receipt, a paper confirming the reception of the letter. My mum was afraid to sign and said her husband would sign it. The man said she should send our father to the National Committee in Pilsen. The man had incredibly evil eyes and we were afraid of him. He was looking at as and kept saying: ‘You will be moving,‘ and seemed extremely pleased with that. My mother was terribly scared. When my father came back from work, my mum gave him the letter, my father read it and, completely speechless, he sat down and said that this was not possible, that we had not done anything, after all.“

“How was the normalization period for you?” – “It was bad because work was no fun for me; there were always some interviews. Every year they interviewed us and graded us according to whether we were apt for the job or not. I once escaped one such interview but my boss has sent one of my colleagues and he brought me back by force. I refused to take part in the interview. Then they wanted to fire me, which they succeeded at. In the end, the workers and masters in the production line have saved me. They stood up for me so that I could work as a technical engineer and so I was not fired but stayed in the job up until I needed to stay at home with my sick father. So I worked as a technical engineer.” – “What were the interviews about?” – “They asked about our opinion on the political situation, what did we have to say about the politics of the Party and so on. I said I had nothing to say. I was not part of the Party and I did not want to speak about that, I had no connection to that. But when it came to work – we all had to speak. How did we like it, what could be improved and so on.”

“Were you angry at the Communists for what they have done to you?” – “Well, angry… On one hand what was good about Mokrouše was that we were a solid group. We needed to support each other against the kids from Tymákov. Because they would always beat us up somewhere. They have beaten me up right on the first day when I went to cinema because of my ‘bourgeois’ background. The Tymákov kids were children of the communists while the ones from Mokrouše were children of entrepreneurs - they were not in the coop and my father was labelled a reactionary because he was not in the Party.” – “The family name of the kids was Tymákovi?” – “No, Tymákov was the municipality nearby. It was a rather big one and we used to go to school there. Mokrouše were an addition to that, like a small village. We used to have a great group there, we played hockey, football, we really had a close connection with those friends. Those were good guys. If there had been a good apartment there, it would have been quite alright. But the housing was terrible. The discrimination continued also at school. When I used to go to school in Tymákov, my female classmates complained to my mum that Jirka knew how to do the math but he would get worse grades than the other children from the municipality. My mother went to see the teacher, Švehla, and he confirmed that. He said: ‘Yes, your son is absolutely not elegant. He does the math so un-elegantly that I cannot give him an A.’ My mother wrote to one of her brothers, who was a teacher, whether elegance is part of grading during exams. He said that this was nonsense. What is decisive is what the student writes on the blackboard and not whether he is elegant or not. He said it was the discrimination of our family which continued also here. He said the teacher was afraid to give me a better grade.”

“In 1967, we founded the art group Intensit. This group exists until today and we took part in many exhibitions. We exhibited in Brno; that was the triennial in Brno. It was organized by Jiří Valoch who works for the National Gallery today. In Gottwaldov – today’s Zlín – there were exhibitions. Then there were exhibitions of graphics in Louny. I took part in all those exhibitions, I received awards in some of them. For example here in Šumperk, there was an exhibition in 1973. Then around 2001, Dr. Losenický did an exhibition ‘Responses to Cubism’ in Pilsen and he invited me to exhibit as well. Some Austrians saw it and they liked my paintings. They have picked only two painters from Pilsen – Mr. Malina and me - to paint Jan Nepomucký, a Saint from Central Europe. Mr. Malina was the director of a gallery. So we painted the paintings in Plasce. We travelled all around Europe with them. We were in Passau, in Vienna in the diocesan museum, in Stephansdom. The exhibition has been in Spain, in Zagreb, Warsaw, Bratislava; in Prague it was in the Franciscan monastery. So we travelled the whole of Europe with those exhibitions. Most of the time they paid us but everywhere we needed to paint a painting. In exchange they paid, for example, for our travels.“