Jarmila Nyklesová

* 1956

  • "I experienced when the tanks were in Sumperk in 1968. I was just a little girl. I experienced when a Russian tank was turned towards our house. My grandmother was a big communist and she said she would go to them and talk them out of it. I told her not to go anywhere. We closed the blinds. As a child I didn't know what was going on, they came at night. My grandmother went to see them, then came back and made them tea, meat, brought them food. She begged them to leave. A lot of people condemned her for that, saying she was supporting the occupiers. But she said, 'No, I don't support the occupiers. You have to make a deal with the occupiers. Don't shout at them. You have to come, you have to explain, you have to politely ask them to leave.' There was a barracks with Russians in Šumperk and the tank went away, away from our house."

  • "They interrogated me for about four hours, asking me all sorts of things, occasionally slapping me and laughing that as an artist I could dance naked on a table and who I was socializing with and stuff like that. That's the kind of thing they say to a young girl, so what can she think... It was humiliation and ridicule. It changed my perspective a lot. Then when you see on TV how good everything is, how the republic is growing and flourishing and everything is going well, then you realise that it's all different."

  • "The interrogation at Bartholomew's will stay with me until the day I die. I was so shocked that I cried for an hour or two and was unable to do anything. For about two days afterwards, I lay there. It was very hard on the psyche. It took a lot out of me. I always thought the police were helping and protecting, and then all of a sudden this captain comes up to you and starts threatening you. If I'm playing with our politics and if I'm a Westerner or an Easterner, questions like that. When a young girl gets threathened like that, she doesn't even know her name. There were two of them. One was laughing, the other was tapping something on a machine. I don't want to talk about it anymore. They kept asking for names, I didn't say anything, even though I knew some of the people. Luckily they stayed safe, but I can tell you it was pretty nerve-wracking."

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    Praha, 17.05.2022

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To live free as Native Americans, it meant freedom but also hard work

Jarmila Nyklesová, 1989, historical photography
Jarmila Nyklesová, 1989, historical photography
photo: pamětnice

Jarmila Nyklesová, née Čechová, was born on 13 June 1956 in Šumperk. Her father Vladimír, a mechanical engineer, was from a family of Volhynian Czechs, her mother Jarmila, née Tlustošová, came from Olomouc and worked as a secretary in a textile factory in Šumperk. Father Vladimír Čech as a then seventeen-year-old in 1944, together with his father Josef Čech, volunteered to join the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps. They fought at Dukla and in May 1945 they reached Prague. Her grandfather then settled with his family in Šumperk, where he was given a farm and fields, which the communists deprived him of again after 1948. At the age of twelve, Jarmila experienced the arrival of tanks in Šumperk. In 1970-1974, she studied at the Textile Industry School in Brno, majoring in design. She then got a job in Prague at the House of Housing Culture, where she designed patterns for home textiles. For most of the normalisation years she worked as a window dresser in department stores. At the beginning of the 1980s she was interrogated by the police in Bartolomějská Street because she was friends with some Chartists. The interrogation was a traumatic experience for her, which turned out to be a turning point in her life. She changed her interests and friends and became involved in North American Indian (Native American) culture. In 1984, she married Luděk Nykles, with whom she became involved in the activities of a community of so-called Euro-Indians (Euro Native Americans), people who organised meetings and camps where they tried to get as close as possible to the life of the Native American tribes. As an artist, she created countless Native American beadwork, clothing and artifacts in her lifetime. It wasn’t until after the revolution in 1989 that she and her husband were able to visit the United States. Around the age of 50, she radically changed her job and after completing a retraining course, she worked for several years until her retirement as an orderly in the operating room at the Na Homolka Hospital. She and her husband raised their daughter Iva.