Mgr. Miroslav Šulc

* 1941

  • "We had a student named Heger, who went to a cottage with a group of students in January, after the first Charter document came out. It was a private event. He read the document there, and one of the students told their parents, which then resulted in them complaining to the school. The headmaster called a meeting, it was headmaster Hofer at the time, and a vote was taken on whether the student would be expelled or not. During the first meeting - passive resistance - a colleague asked the headmaster to postpone the meeting so we could think about our decision, which was a tactical error. During the second meeting, the principal asked who was against the expulsion. Three people voted against the expulsion, in alphabetical order - the poet Vit Slíva, who is now generally known in certain circles, Jiřina Šťastná and myself, that was because we were all Catholics. He no longer asked who was in favor of the expulsion, he calculated the rest as being in favor, and that student was actually expelled from the school in the year he was due to graduate."

  • "The Russian teacher in her class said that Vaculík's so-called pamphlet “Two Thousand Words” contained instructions to hang the Communists. Jan Šabata, who was the son of the famous protagonist of '68, said that was not true. The lady turned it into a political scandal. She wanted to get into the Communist Party, but they didn't want her, so she reported it to the headmaster. Supposedly the principal told the inspector, and the inspector told him that he had to forward it to the prosecutor, and then the school had a vote on the expulsion of Šabata."

  • "On the other hand, for example our neighbor Zahrádková, née Eiseltová, from No. 12, complained that the soldiers used to defecate in her beddings in the attic, because they didn't know how to use the toilet. So they used the beddings, it was always like sheet-cover-sheet and so on, that's the way they did it. Some of the stories are funnier, like the dentist Nechvátal told my mother that a Russian came to him with a handful of gold and demanded his teeth to be pulled out and replaced with gold ones. Or the hairdresser, Hliněná, said that a Russian came to her and wanted her to do a perm on his short hair. When she finished it and wanted to put him under a standing hair dryer, he was so scared that she had to blow-dry his hair."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Brno, 01.12.2022

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    duration: 02:20:24
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Brno, 20.01.2023

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    duration: 13:59
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 3

    Brno, 06.02.2023

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    duration: 11:22
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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A teacher and his students in a normalization fight for a higher moral principle

Miroslav Šulc in 1956 in his ID photo
Miroslav Šulc in 1956 in his ID photo
photo: Contemporary witness's archive

Miroslav Šulc was born on June 11, 1941 in Brno to a very brave couple - his father Bedřich Šulc walked through whole Russia as a legionary during the First World War, while his mother Milada Šulcová, née Nejezchlebová, helped to distribute messages from the imprisoned anti-Nazi resistance fighter Antonín Roupec during the Second World War. All his life he worked as a high school mathematics and physics teacher and continued the family tradition - he also took the right side in the crucial moments of the normalization, for example during a vote on expulsion of an unjustly accused student. His whole life he was a man of faith. He could not express his faith openly, but it served him as a moral compass that guided him through the period of socialism. The second pillar he relied on in his life was his hobby, to which he had devoted himself since his childhood - astronomy focusing on the study of meteors. Since 1996, he has been the controller for the Society for Interplanetary Matter, an association of astronomers interested in the small bodies of the solar system. In 2023 Miroslav Šulc was still living in his native town, Brno.