Jiřina Permanová

* 1934

  • "I remember that day from the night before, because at that time I lived on General Svoboda Avenue and the road that led there next to our house, all those, I don't know if all, but the vast majority of those Russian tanks drove along that road. Well, we were all crowded by the windows, watching what was going on, we didn't turn on the lights, we were just looking out, what was actually happening. Well, tanks were driving, soldiers were driving, and the next day we found out what it actually meant and the theater is close to the square where the tanks were also standing. They were aiming. After all, a piece of the arcade fell there too. I didn't even know when it happened that those six people died there. They now have the memorials at the town hall. It was so sad. We were afraid."

  • "That's where I started going to school and of course I started playing the piano. That was the main thing for me all my life, but it didn't last long. I went to a Polish school, but it didn't last long, because the war ended and we could go to Czech. So, it was wonderful. So, I knew Polish. Only Czech was spoken in the family. Bad Czech, but Czech. And it was also funny when I came to the Czech school in Czech already, in Podbořany, and I didn't know some words. For example, the word 'skýva', meaning a 'slice of bread'. Well, what is a 'skýva' (slice). I have never heard such a word in Poland. The children laughed: 'She doesn't know what a skýva is'. And we had such a good teacher, his name was Horák, and he said: 'Children, don't laugh at that little girl, she knows a lot of other things that you don't'. Well, it's just a small memory from my childhood."

  • "Then the Germans took my dad to the war. Coincidentally, he got to Czechoslovakia and was in Hanušovice in Moravia. My mother and I, my sister, mother, and I, stayed in Volhynia. Równe. But because we were there alone and we knew that my mother's mother lived in Poland, which was still Poland, that is my grandmother and aunts and relatives, so we moved. Even I don't remember much about it, but my sister sometimes remembers that we walked somewhere along the road with a suitcase. We traveled somewhere until we got to our grandmother in Zelów. Near Lodz. Well, we waited there for the end of the war. And when the war was over, my father was in Czech, in Podbořany near Žatec, he was an agronomist engineer, he got a job there, he also got us a place to live. And we were the very first family, a family from Volhynia, which got to him in Bohemia. And then others went. My various aunts and acquaintances and relatives. Then they traveled partly from Volhynia and partly from Poland, from Zelów."

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    ED Liberec, 30.01.2022

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Life written in notes. Communists ruled outside, behind the walls of the theater

Jiřina Permanová in 1950
Jiřina Permanová in 1950
photo: archive of the witness

Jiřina Permanová was born on January 4, 1934 in Volhynia, in the city of Rovno. Shortly after the beginning of the Second World War, the Germans, who occupied Rovno, took her father Bohumil Perman to forced labor. Her mother Marie and her daughters Jiřina and Anna did not want to stay alone in Rovno, so they moved to live with relatives in Zelów in Poland, where they lived until the end of the war. In the meantime, her dad found housing in Czechoslovakia, and the Permans were one of the first families to return to their former homeland in 1945. Jiřina Permanová loved playing the piano since she was young. Everything important was given to her by professor Jaroslav Hauft at the music school in Liberec. In 1962, she auditioned for the F. X. Šalda Theater in Liberec, where she spent the next forty-five years. She worked as a répétiteur in the opera and played with her third husband the violinist František Bulva in his sextet. She also experienced the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 and demonstrations and a strike in the theater during the Velvet Revolution in the fall of 1989 in Liberec. She received the Honor of the Governor of the Liberec Region in 2021 for her lifelong contribution to music. At the time of the interview in 2022 she lived in Liberec. We were able to record the story of the witness thanks to the support of the Statutory City of Liberec.