“We had our Russian grandma here and she could not read and write. Only when we started going to school, she would say: ‘Show me those letters.’ She learnt to read print letters from us and she would read sometimes. But she only read the crime reporting section in the newspaper and she would always say that the world was heading into doom. She loved children, she knew how to deal with us, and we were growing in the loving presence of our grandma. We called her ‘bajbina.’ Not grandmother, ‘babička,’ but ‘bajbi.’” Interviewer: “What did she think about the political situation, if she was interested in that?” – “She did not care about it at all. She only came to face it in 1968, and it was in a dramatic way. Until that time, she had been liked by people, because she was helping everybody. And then came 1968. We were scared and grandmother became completely different, as if she was a different person, and she felt miserable. We asked her what happened. She said that they did not want to sell bread to her in the shop. Because she was a Russian. People who refused to sell her bread were people for whom she had been sewing clothes until that time… and they made her feel that. Not all people, but some. The emotions were horrible, it was horrible what it was doing with people.”
“What followed in my work. I worked in the Institute for Scientific and Technical Information in Prague 2. I was in charge of a small group of employees there. I was not a member of the Communist Party. When 1968 happened, they started sorting people. Political screenings were being prepared. It was something so humiliating… Twelve people were sitting there opposite me. The screenings were done in the office in the headquarters. I knew all twelve of them, for several years. But they were not skilled people. For example, an old hag from the storehouse, who began working in my group when I was the manager, then voted against me. During the screenings they questioned us about our opinions regarding the entry of the Warsaw Pact armies to our country... Well, you can’t imagine how humiliating it was.”
“My husband said definitely: ‘I will not stay here.’ Everything was already arranged and we were abroad. But our son Michal was in Czechoslovakia, because they did not allow him to travel with us at that time. It was at the beginning of 1969. Husák just got to power. We had a few months before they closed the borders for good. My husband meanwhile arranged for us that we would stay in Switzerland where we had some relatives. I was to go back for Michal afterwards. But suddenly I realized what would happen with grandma. She was as old as I am now. I thus said that I will not be escaping anywhere. Because I would not be able to do that to my grandma, to make her emigrate for the second time – from the homeland to which she had grown attached. My husband said: ‘All right, but never in my life do I want to hear that you miss something,or that you do not have something, or that you desire something.’”
Naděžda Dočekalová, née Kestřánková, was born December 16, 1940 in Chlumec nad Cidlinou into a family of a forest engineer Boris Kestřánek. She had sister Věra, who was one and a half years younger, and brother Boris, who was twelve years younger. The family history reaches back to Russia, where the Kestřánek family went in the 19th century from southern Bohemia in order to establish a brewery there. They eventually stayed and continued living there and it was only the generation of Naděžda’s Czech-Russian grandparents who re-emigrated to Czechoslovakia. Their return to Czechoslovakia was made possible thanks to their son Boris, who got an opportunity to leave the Bolshevik Russia after the establishment of Czechoslovakia and to complete his studies at a Russian grammar school in Moravská Třebová. Boris worked as a forest engineer for Count Kinský. After the end of WWII the family feared that they would be forcibly repatriated back to the USSR by the Soviet counter-intelligence organization SMERSH. Fearing communist persecution, Boris Kestřánek joined the Communist Party after 1948, but attitude toward the Party was a conflicting one. As a daughter of a “Russian immigrant,” Naděžda’s personal-political assessment was not too favorable and she did not receive a recommendation to study journalism as she wished, but she was allowed to study library and information science. She worked in the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information in Prague. She and her husband were preparing to emigrate to Switzerland in 1969, but she eventually did not do leave the country because of her elderly grandmother Alexandra. Grandmother Alexandra already considered Czechoslovakia her homeland and she suffered during the period after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies to Czechoslovakia in August 1968 because people began turning away from her due to her Russian nationality. In November 1989, Naděžda’s son Michal, present-day director of the drama ensemble of the National Theatre, became the leader of the students’ strike at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU).
