"We said to each other after the first years of this process: 'Damn, wouldn´t it better to oppose the regime more radically in November? Imprison a few people, charge them with treason?' That is a crime against one's own nation, to imprison people just for saying their opinion. Taking their property for choosing not to agree, going abroad. Everyone who left, lost everything they had here. This cannot be left unpunished. The fact that the revolution, the coup, the social change was velvet in quotation marks, those who lost their positions profited from it, abused it. They clearly got rich in the end. Nothing happened to them. They had their contacts, they founded their companies. They started different projects together, had contacts abroad. These were people in foreign trade, in leading positions. If they were not pensioners who retired, they received luxurious pensions from the salaries assessed to them by the then regime. Which they measured out for themselves. Those pensions were certainly not small. Nothing happened to anyone - everyone was finally satisfied and some, like Snášel, still wanted to heal from it. They still felt some grievance. This was symbolic in this case. The one who did the harm finally shouted: 'You hurt me, apologize. I'm not to blame. You, under the new democratic rules, can't tell me I did something wrong without proving it. Apologies everyone. To us who held it in power here.' That, I think, was symbolic in this case. So that annoyed me.'
"At first I thought it was a bit funny. A person who represented a criminal organization - because to me communists are criminals who stole property, imprisoned people, murdered - that person was offended when someone told him that he was doing something wrong, he began to talk about democracy and things that he had always suppressed. He said: 'That's not possible, you can't tell me that I'm a demagogue. You will apologize to me for that.' I found that hilariously absurd. But then our smile froze a little. Because gradually the courts, which in the 1990s had not yet all been replaced by people who were created in the new regime - those people weren't there - people who had studied under the previous regime were in the courts, worked as lawyers, prosecutors... Suddenly we found out that it it's not that funny. They told us: 'You are not allowed to slander someone, say about him that he abused his political position, that he is a demagogue, apologize here to Comrade Snášel.' We said: 'What is this, what is this supposed to mean? Some new society is being created here, we got rid of these scumbags who oppressed another ten, then fifteen million people here for forty years, and they will ask us to apologize to them? Eventually, we are going to give them some compensation for the damage that they had to leave the Central Committee, right?' It seemed completely absurd to me."
“This person, who served a criminal organization, began to plead for defamation and sued the three students who signed this letter. It seemed absurd to me at the time, completely ridiculous. When I went to the police station for questioning for the first time, I did not understand at all what we were talking about there. That was in 1991. I laughed for about two days about what these people really wanted from me. But in a year, I laughed on the other side of my face, when we were first invited to court. And then the second time, the third time, the tenth time. The smile on our lips stiffened a little. After the first instance, when that judge - unfortunately, in the 23 years that the trial lasted, it went through all the levels of the courts, got all the way to Strasbourg and back again, I don't know exactly what judge was where. That court vindicated us and said it was nonsense. Why should students apologize for an opinion? But there was an appeal, based on the appeal it was said that the students are responsible for their words. Prove that he really was a careerist, a demagogue, arrogant and that he abused his political position. Prove it. Proving these things is really difficult.“
Zdeněk Hirnšal was born on June 15, 1968 in an ordinary Brno family. In 1986, he started studying architecture at the Brno University of Technology. One of the teachers at the faculty at that time was assistant professor Jan Snášel, a committed party member who was elected chairman of the faculty Elementary Organisation of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia in October 1989. Zdeněk Hirnšal participated in the student strike in November 1989 as a member of the faculty strike committee. Together with classmates Jiří Slezák and Martin Laštovička, they signed an open letter on behalf of the entire student community demanding leaving of some teachers. Jan Snášel also appeared on the list. In 1990, he really had to leave the school, he did not pass the selection process that was announced by the school management. In the subsequent legal process, he managed to get compensation for this. In 1991, he also sued the three signatories of an open letter calling for his resignation, demanding a public apology after students labeled him a careerist and demagogue which abused his political power. The trial lasted until 2013, went through all levels of courts, and reached the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The final decision of the court vindicated the former students, they did not have to apologize. After completing his studies in 1992, Zdeněk Hirnšal ran a snowboard school in Pec pod Sněžkou for three years. Then, in the years 1995–2000, he worked in a Brno company of his former teacher, the architect Uhlíř. Together with his classmates, he founded the architectural studio Dimenze Brno and soon after that he owns the company Archtex, which deals with membrane and organic architecture. In 2021, he was the co-owner of Vertigia Systems, which focuses on vertical greenery, green facades and greenery in interiors.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
