Vladimír Oktavec

-

“The meeting ended with students bursting into fascination and the fear they had, when cancelling the strike of the previous evening, was gone. They were strengthened. It smoldered in them, although they were intimidated a day before. Probably, they had to face various threats and coercion to cancel it. And now, encouraged by this action, they joined us and we spontaneously decided to demonstrate at once; as the citizens of Trnava, we also decided to join the revolutionary movement and demonstrate at the Square. The people from Bratislava left by car and it was only in our hands to lead the student to the Square. Juraj Nvota ran ahead to the theatre and returned with such a loudspeaker, which we had in our property-room and was used in some theatre plays. He shoved it to my hand and so when we came to the Square, we already had the loudspeaker. We gathered together with the students at the Square. Today, the place is known as the Trinity Square, but back then it was the Klement Gottwald Square. There were about 7 – 8 stairs and then an entrance platform to get to the community center. I stepped on those stairs and without any preparations I spoke using the loudspeaker, improvising and moderating the first meeting. Moreover, there I also forewarned that on the next day we were going to prepare at this Square a really big meeting for Trnava.”

“My second experience was that I had a visit from the District Court and they said they wanted to express distrust towards the chairman of the District Court. They asked me to come along. I told them it was their task as they had known the whole situation and the reasons, but they said, they would do everything, but wanted to have there someone from the Public Against Violence movement. So even the judges had fear to officially express their distrust, to remove a District Court chairman from the office without presence of someone, who at that moment represented the ruling power. That is just a proof we were really not used to any displays of democracy. The whole awareness of living functioned on a principle that when one wanted to express his opinion or will, there had to be some authority to approve it.”

“He worked as a managing editor of the Osveta publishing house. And that was ill-fated for him, because after the peripeties he had to suffer during the Slovak State, the communists came and he got in trouble for the second time. And not only into trouble, but literally, no one could hide him and thus he had to end up in prison. In 1954 or 1955 a group of intellectuals from Martin, under the lead of Alexander Hirner – a founder of the Slovak sociology, they had an idea to publish Slovak encyclopedia. Slovakia didn’t have any encyclopedia until then. They started to prepare it in Osveta publishing house, which my father managed. They had prepared composition of A – D entries, when the State Security came and ruined all of it. Seven people were arrested in January 1959 and in May or June there was a big trial held at the Žilina Regional Court. It was one of the last political trials in Slovakia, when they were sentenced and my father got seven years for subverting the socialist system and larceny of the property held in socialist ownership.”