Petr Gruša

* 1946

  • "Two years later, really about two years later, a secret one knocked - or knocked, or maybe kicked the door in - some secret one. But by then I was already working in Rytířská street. He emptied all my desk drawers into a bag. That's how I got picked up and sent to Barťák." - "So you were working and then suddenly bang?" - "Yes. That wasn't the room we worked in, you can't get in there nowadays, there's a company there. There was a gallery, that's where we sat, there were no individual seats. Fifty other people saw what they were doing to me there, emptying my drawers into a bag. And to Barťák. I was there for about forty-eight hours."

  • "I have no way of verifying this, but it was claimed that the first tank to arrive in Prague broke down the door of the General Staff. Resistance was expected. We saw that first unit. There were hundreds of them on that general staff. - "Hundreds of soldiers?" - "Soldiers. Men, mostly of Asian appearance." - "But there must have been some commanders?" - "There were. But I think the first sequence was really planned to be written off, in case we fought back, the first sequence would be written off, let them fall quietly, and then the real troops would come in. It gave that impression. They'd given up on them, they had nothing to eat. Then we tormented them there by going to the Army, buying salami, and like a bastard I would walk down the corridors and take a bite and they would look up at us hungrily."

  • "It was quite demanding, because there you went to guard - it was a guard unit of the engineer unit - you went to guard at every other twenty-four, completely out of order, because otherwise the density could be after three days at most, and here it was twenty-four." - "With sharp ones?" "With sharp ones. There were also-this was later, when I wasn't there, I was only there six months-there were some suicide attempts from that mechanism, about three people. Yet the unit is one company, and two people killed themselves there, and several went to Sabinov for punishment. There was six months for smoking in the guardhouse, about a year in Sabinov for falling asleep in the guardhouse. Just draconian sentences. So I was quite glad to get out of there."

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In the spring of 1968, half o the the general staff walked around pale. After August 21, the other half walked pale.

Petr Gruša, 2023
Petr Gruša, 2023
zdroj: Post Bellum

Petr Gruša was born on 5 December 1946 in Prague to Libuše and Oldřich Gruša. His cousin on his father‘s side was dissident and post-Soviet politician and diplomat Jiří Gruša. He spent his childhood near the Emmaus Monastery in Prague‘s New Town. In 1961, he entered the secondary general education school (similar to today‘s gymnasium) in Botičská Street in Prague. He did not finish his studies and started working at the national company Kancelářské stroje. He did not graduate until he was employed. In 1966 he enlisted in the guard unit of the engineer unit in Jánská near Česká Kamenice, where he served for half a year. He spent the rest of his military service at the General Staff of the Czechoslovak People‘s Army, where he also lived through the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops. In 1971/1972 he co-founded the amateur theatre group Lampa. In 1972, he copied six hundred copies of a book with religious themes, Principled People, at work, for which he was interrogated by State Security (StB) two years later. In the end, he got off scot-free, but he could no longer work in the reprographics department. In 2023 he was living in Prague.