Alena Koňáková

* 1944

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  • "The World Youth Festival, the last time it was in Korea, I was doing a different kind of group leader at the school, but more or less we were doing different clubs, different jobs, and just the task was to do some special... some special thing like in honor of the festival, possibly send some money or something like that. So we went and planted a piece of forest at that time, and by showing an activity... an activity that everybody could see and see that it was, our school was well appreciated at that time and I got to go to that Korea. So now comparing what was said about Korea or what we saw with what I had the opportunity to see there. And especially the amount of young people, I was quite old, I couldn't count as one of those young people anymore, but the friendships that were made there... What you could see was the comparison between the lives of ordinary Koreans and those who were a little better off... Plus, Koreans are very hardworking people."

  • "My colleague and I were waiting for the train, because I was on the Lužná - Mutějovice train, and a load came by and the guys, the driver and the boilerman threw newspapers at us. And we learned from the newspaper, because they were going with the load from Prague to Most to get coal, and suddenly we learned from the newspaper what was going on, because there wasn't much in the newspaper, on the radio. Again, it depends on how interested one was in that time, what was going on. Well, it wasn't pretty because I was coming from school. I had the little one in a pram, Milan was passing by, and a tank was following me through the whole of Lišany. And let me tell you, I was very scared."

  • "But I had a teaching school written down as a second place. And that was what my dad didn't want. 'You're not gonna break anyone's back, you're not gonna do this!' I was probably, I'm going to say it rather vulgarly at the time, I couldn't understand what my dad meant by that, and he wasn't able to tell me. It took a very long time for my dad to explain to me that we were learning something at school that wasn't true or it looked different than it was. So then I said, 'Look, I'm not going to teach history and I'm not going to break anyone's back in math. That's a given.' So dad went along with it."

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    Rakovník , 07.11.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 01:02:09
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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The boilerman threw a newspaper at us and we read in the newspaper that we were occupied

Alena Koňáková in the 80s
Alena Koňáková in the 80s
photo: Archive of the witness

Alena Koňáková, née Zachariášová, was born on August 26, 1944 in Havlíčkův Brod. She started school there and after the fifth grade the family moved to a secluded place near Rakovník, where her father got a job on a state farm. After the eleventh grade she tried unsuccessfully to get into medical school. She moved to Most, where she started working as a bank clerk. After a year, she entered the Faculty of Education and after graduating she got a teaching position in Příčina in Rakovník. She went on to teach in Čistá, Lišany and from 1968 in Mutějovice, where she worked until her retirement in 2002. In 1989 she travelled to the World Youth Festival in North Korea. In 2024 she lived in Lužná.