Jan Bednář

* 1953

  • "The first time I was in that interrogation, I know exactly that it was on the thirteenth [of January]. That was the big raid where about 50 Charter people were brought in for questioning, and that was the only questioning because that was the first time I actually testified or rather tried to answer. There was this, I was interrogated by a Slovak, a kind of Slovak State Security officer. It took place in Ruzyně. We were taken to Ruzyně to a room and I spent several hours there. He asked me where I was born, that my parents had a farm, kulaks and such. And then he asked me how I signed the Charter. So, and we had already agreed that we mustn't tell, so I said I wouldn't tell him, and now he got very angry. And this went on, as I say, for about a couple of hours, where he threatened me and I was really afraid that I was going to be arrested there, that I was in that building for the first time, that horrible building in Ruzyně, but in the end I didn't tell him. He wrote that I refused to testify. I signed it, and that was the first and last time I signed any statement to them. They let me go in the afternoon, they let me go that day, and I was relieved because I thought this was close and I went home. Well, and then we found out he was arrested, well, we all told each other, we found out what a big deal it was."

  • "Well, one day Petr Uhl came - it was Christmas 1976 - and brought the text of the Charter and asked if we wanted to sign it, and I think my mother had either signed it right away or had already signed it, I don't know. But he offered it to me or I just saw it there, I said I wanted to sign it too, so I read it or I had already, I feel like I had already read it before. But he just collected the signatures, this Peter Uhl, he was one of the few people who collected the signatures. So I signed it for him, and it had a strange peripeteia that my signature was not actually published in the first row, where the 245 signatures or how many, but only in the second row on the 1st of February. And the reason for that was that actually they, I was one of the few people who studied and signed the Charter, there were about two, there was me and Zina Freund Koçová at that time. And they somehow, there was some kind of a discussion about it, even Petr Uhl and the people I knew at that time, they said to me, 'Well, but if you sign it, you'll be fired from school, you know, of course.' I said, 'Sure, I know that,' because I had had enough of the school and I thought, 'I'm not going to play some communist economist somewhere, so I'm just going to give up, let them fire me.' So I was going to sign it, but somehow they decided to put it aside. And what happened was that Václav Havel had several signatures in his desk, and they sort of divided it up and they sorted the signatures and they had them deposited, so to speak, and I was deposited there too. But of course, I was only deposited there until January 6th, when the police came in and searched Havel's desk and found the signature there, so I was thus exposed. And that's also why they picked me up a week later."

  • "When we got there, it was about midnight, so we arrived at the train station in Vienna and we got off the train and we didn't know what to do. So we went to a hotel that was around the corner. Then it turned out in the morning that it was an hourly hotel, so we paid absolutely unbelievable money, but then we just went to some of those... We looked for some of these offices and then we slept one night in this dormitory which was absolutely horrible, it was some kind of a gymnasium where the Spartakiada deck chairs were laid out, where everybody who came from Czechoslovakia, crowds of people, so they stayed there. That was the first clue, and at the same time there were already some interviews going on, or we were filling in some questionnaire, who was who, from where and what and how. And there were some people from the embassy there or some people like that we met... Some immigration officials were there for sure."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 19.10.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:55:03
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 2

    Praha, 16.11.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:53:14
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I told myself I don´t care I‘d be fired, and I signed the charter.

Jan Bednar in 2021
Jan Bednar in 2021
zdroj: Post Bellum

Jan Bednář was born on 1 February 1953 in Prague. His mother was Otta Bednářová, a dissident, journalist and co-founder of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS). After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, he spent two months in Vienna, where he went with his mother and brother. In 1972 he graduated from the Gymnasium Na Zatlance. Thanks to the fact that he concealed the fact that his mother had been expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), he was admitted to university. From 1972 to 1977 he studied at the University of Economics (VŠE) in Prague. In December 1976, he signed the Charter 77 declaration, which prevented him from completing his studies. He then worked in various blue-collar professions. In the following years he was followed by State Security Service (StB), interrogated and later forced to emigrate as part of the Asanace Action. In June 1982 he travelled to the UK, where he settled. From 1982 to 1985 he studied at Oxford University. He then worked in the Czechoslovak editorial office of the BBC in London until 1992. In 1992 he returned to Czechoslovakia permanently. In 2021 he lived in Prague.