Big, sudden changes rarely bring anything good
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Květoslava Kučerová, née Kraslová, was born on 5 December 1941. She came from a family baptized by the Vltava River. Her mother Božena was a trained seamstress, which ensured the family’s survival during the war years. Her father, Jaromír, was a carpenter, but he left his wife and three daughters in 1944 because he could not bear the fact that his wife was providing for the family when he had no jobs during the war. After the euphoria of the end of the war, there was a hard clash with the reality after the February coup: there was again large-scale denunciations, people were again afraid of their neighbours. After primary school, Květa entered the boarding Secondary School of Medicine and the Higher School of Medicine in Brno, majoring in pharmacy laboratory technician. She was almost expelled from the school in her second year, because a complaint came from the street committee that her mother did not attend political meetings, did not do voluntary work and was not interested in what was going on in the street, thus not supporting the building of a socialist homeland. Fortunately, the First Republican pharmacists, who made up the majority of the teaching staff, were not about to expel a promising student because of an ideological denunciation. In 1960 Květoslava successfully graduated and in July she started working in a pharmacy in Prague as a pharmacy technician. In 1961 her daughter Jana was born, and in 1968 Radka. The loose atmosphere of the sixties she perceived as a social relaxation rather than a direct participation in society as a whole - people stopped watching each other so much. In the early 1970s she divorced and remarried, and her son Jan was born. She remembers the 1970s as a period of mainly career struggles and settling professional scores. She approached the November Revolution in 1989 with caution - in her experience, big and fast changes had not yet brought anything good, and a good orator could stir up crowds in unpleasant ways. She told herself she would wait to see how it all turned out. But what she very much welcomed was the withdrawal of Warsaw Pact troops from our territory. The disappointment did not wait long - she recalled the unfair practices during the coupon privatisation of the 1990s. She is not enthusiastic about the post-November development - she is critical of the increasing dilettantism of elected government representatives and the increasing populism. In 2025, Květoslava Kučerová lived in a house in Vršovice with her children, grandchildren and family dog.
