"I was still on maternity leave, so actually what was happening at work, I learned from stories. I was at the Academy of Sciences, and the Institute for the Czech Language there is not exactly a place that is politically involved. Nobody cares about it either. So do the historians, they've been after those. Anyway, I came to the faculty and I was affected by - it's a totally comical situation - as many people were affected by being thrown out of their jobs, what happened to me was that I was replaced. They literally replaced me with a colleague. I had a position at the Institute for the Czech Language, it was systematized at that time, right. But it was for little money, it wasn't a fancy position, but nevertheless, a colleague was fired from the faculty. He was vice-rector before, he still remembers it, we knew each other of course. But they just replaced him with me. They put me in a faculty I didn't want to go to, for God's sake! And they put him in the institute. He had a third child at the time, and he got a small salary, but they were just happy to put him aside. They didn't suspend me, they put me in college and I didn't want to go. I lost my major. I trained as a dialectologist, in dialect. I loved it. It's silly to say it like that, but I loved it. It was very interesting. All of a sudden, I went, I got a call from the faculty, I was still on maternity leave, and they told me that I was going to teach from the 1st of January. But I didn't even know what I was teaching. So when somebody says they were thrown out of their job, I say I got promoted, but not voluntarily at all, I didn't want to be there. That's just the way people were treated, like a package. He was fired, he was assigned to another institute, and in the end he must have been glad he had the job because it was a professional job. How would they feed the children?"
"And it was a crazy shock. Because - it was like, 'The money's going to fall' and stuff, the girls in the café knew that. Because in cafes, and in pubs, they know everything. But the President came out and said there would be no monetary reform, that was a radio speech, very serious. And then the next day it exploded. Literally. It just... the next day it blew, Monday it blew, all the money lost value. A certain amount was converted one to five, the rest one to fifty. That is, who had money at home, for example, for something, you know, that the parents - in those days it was not like today with banks, that the parents had money at home, for example, to buy furniture - and suddenly absolutely nothing. It was a shock! We were a rich family, because nobody had anything, but our grandmother took her pension and the moment the currency reform fell, she got it in new money, of course, converted one to five. So that we would have something to buy food with, because at that moment it was impossible. They didn't want someone to bring a bag of crowns, in the shop. That was a terrible shock."
"And then I remember, all of a sudden the army came. And we were still sitting in the basement. Now they came into the house and you could hear it. And they held me in their arms, I was still a little baby, I was four and a half, I was a baby. The only one - in a distant, extended family. And my great-grandmother came out - I still remember it - and she said, 'I'm old now, there's no pity for me, I'll go and see.' She really had the courage, it was terrifying. But fortunately that first group were quite posh soldiers. Then went the sort of scum, as they say. But that was the first experience that this grandmother had, that there was a soldier there and that the soldier treated her decently. And we gradually moved out of that [basement]."
Prof. PhDr. Marie Krčmová, CSc., née Hrabáková, was born on 24 December 1940 in Brno into the family of Josef Hrabák, a Czech literary historian and university professor of Czech literature. Her mother - although university educated - was a housewife and created a background for her husband so that he could devote himself to extensive publishing. At the age of almost five, Marie Krčmová experienced the liberation of Brno at the end of the Second World War. She recalls how the whole family spent several days in the coal cellar while two bombs hit their street. Red Army soldiers came to their house and the witness mentions the courage of her great-grandmother, who was the first to come out of the cellar to survey the situation. The currency reform was a huge shock for the family - as it was for everyone else - and the education reform also affected Marie Krčmová, as she lost a year of her studies thanks to the new arrangement. After the events of August 1968, there were personnel changes and Marie Krčmová was transferred from the Institute for the Czech Language at the Academy of Sciences to the university, where she did not want to go because she could not devote herself to her beloved activity, namely the study of dialectology, due to her new job. She worked at the university until her retirement and experienced the Velvet Revolution. Marie Krčmová died on 6 March 2023 at the age of 82.
