"I was 1968 and the year was incredible. I was actually lucky in my life. The college admission exams were actually that - exams. There were applications like now; I applied for history at the Faculty of Arts as my second choice, but the Faculty of Paediatrics was my first choice. We took written tests; there were oral exams in maybe just two subjects; other than that we just took tests in four subjects and got point scores. The next morning the dean's office put up a list of names in an order based on our point scores. They drew a line and said, the first 85 of you will make it and the rest will not. We all got in. True, they 'sifted' us out - with many admitted, only about a third of us graduated. But the fact is that it was without any problems. When my sister did this three years later, it was borderline for her. She got into what they called the 'zero year' and did everything the same way as the first year with the understanding that if she gets straight A's she will make it to the second year. If she fails, she will not advance. My sister studied like crazy, did everything perfectly and yet wasn't accepted. We found out afterwards that it was because of dad. Poor thing, she took the hit... over his 'cadre profile'."
I remember our first visit it like it was today. They put us up in a barn overnight and we got straw mattresses with straw sticking out. It wasn't very pleasant. The sanitary situation was pretty miserable. It was just troughs with cold water. That would still be fine if you could actually get to them. We were packed in there, so many of us; it wasn't just one class and there were also other schools together. We were always happy to make friends with local villagers, and they would let us wash in their garden. We also went on strike because the only food we ever got was pasta with tomato sauce, so we went on strike and marched round banging on our mess tims. One day, we even managed avoiding work completely. They wanted to punish us in an exemplary way, but somehow it fizzled out.
"We moved to Kutná Hora. My parents, mum and dad, stayed in Prague because our family situation was difficult. Not in terms of relationships; my dad had lost his lawyer job and my mom was a gynecologist and worked hard. She worked at a clinic and had to work long shifts very often. My grandparents tragically lost a son a year before I was born. My mother's brother killed himself. They were in such a bad place mentally. See, our family owned a house in Kutná Hora and there was my grandfather's surgery and a garden, and so the decision was made to move us children to our grandparents. My dad and mum would come to Kutná Hora every Saturday - they worked Saturdays back then - to be with us and do the laundry and things like that to help out grandpa and grandma."
Physician Michaela Piňosová, née Scholzová, was born in Prague on 15 February 1950. Her mother was a gynaecologist and her father a lawyer. He refused to join the Party after 1948, lost his job, and was only rehabilitated in 1967. The witness and her siblings lived with their grandparents in Kutná Hora. She graduated from a general high school and faced a threat of not being allowed to graduate. She enrolled in medical school as a paediatrician in 1968 and went to work in Teplice after graduation. She went to Malta to work as an anaesthesiologist in 1989 and spent the Velvet Revolution time there. When she returned to Prague with her family in 1991, she started working at the Bulovka Hospital emergency room and stayed for almost 28 years. Today (2024) she lives in Prague, is retired yet still works in hospital.
