Hana Dutá

* 1938

  • "We listened to the radio, the television. We listened to it at school. The children went to manifest. Children and students went to Prague. It was nice. The actors came to visit us at school at that time."

  • "I went to work in the morning, I was working down on the chandeliers, and then I was going to the bus and everyone said, 'The Russians have occupied us.' And I was wondering, why anyone would occupy us. I jumped off the bus seeing the tanks and I rang here. The man came and said, 'Who died again?' Because we were great relatives. I said, 'No, we're being occupied.' We had an army over there in the falconry, and they always went to the windows with a tank, so the man always put the vase somewhere else, but they aimed it again."

  • "The teacher I married at eighteen has been teaching at a Czech school in Romania for two years. Then we were there for two years. It was magical there. They didn't have electricity there, they didn't have anything there, but it was sensational. They lived there as before in Austria-Hungary. But they knew beautiful Czech, no one would know that they moved there under Maria Theresa. There were many estates and filed, they were preparing everything there. It was beautiful there. Then we used to go there every year on vacation."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Kamenický Šenov, 16.06.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 41:15
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

Be that as it may, we are at home here

Hana Dutá (en)
Hana Dutá (en)
photo: Archiv pamětnice

Hana Dutá, née Pilná, was born on July 31, 1938 in Kamenický Šenov into the family of a glassmaker and clerk. She spent most of her life in her native North Bohemian village. From the period of the Second World War, she still remembers the sound of sirens and escaping to the cellar during air raids. In 1953 she entered the chemical-technological high school in Nový Bor. She graduated a year later and began working as an accountant at Crystalex in Novoborsk. During high school, she met her future husband. In 1956, she married him at the age of 18 and they went to the Romanian town of Banat together. They spent two years in the Czech village of Eibenthal, where her husband taught at a local school. She experienced the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in Kamenický Šenov, where she watched the arrival of tanks. Until her retirement, she worked as an accountant at the Secondary School of Glassmaking in Kamenický Šenov, where she lived while filming the interview (2021).