"They said: 'The party is seeking a new job for the former of water and sewerage company director sacked for incompetence. If you wish, they'll make him your boss and you'll suffer under that dunce.' I didn't want that; I couldn't stand the idea because I had seen what havoc such morons could wreak in the archive. So I signed in. I was under my candidacy period and then I was admitted in late 1988. I was only there for a brief period, but I didn't just walk away like others did. They would turn in their member cards right after 17 November 1989, but I said no. Since I had done wrong, I might as well do some damage. So I became a follower of the Democratic Communist Forum. That's a big oxymoron, but it was invented by Ransdorf and a few people in Prague. That faction was interesting, for example it was the first to demand a ban on the People's Militia. The Civic Forum had not demanded that yet then. I also got to attend the party's 18th Congress as a guest along with Ransdorf. He was also a guest of the DFKA. There, I found out it was a union of someone who could never be convinced. On the first day, I saw a scene where the present Dean Miroslav Ševčík was given the floor and said: 'Comrades, I think that we should consider a vote on whether to dissolve the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, because if we consider the positives and the negatives, the negatives clearly prevail, and this party should no longer exist.' All hell broke loose. Some Slovak delegates thew shoes and whatnot at him - just a big mess. Ransdorf goes, 'Come on, let's smash their faces in.' I said: 'Sit your ass down and stay down. You're a historian, you're also a philosopher, and history is happening right here in front of you.' If I'd egged him on, we would have had a fight and Ransdorf might have been the chairman of the Czechoslovak Social Democracy, but it didn't happen. Well, I couldn't stand it anymore, so I got on the train and wrote an article for Průboj, and it was called something like 'The Eighteenth Congress through the eyes of a guest'. I wrote that the party didn't want to abandon the principles of democratic centralism, that it was Stalinist, and that this couldn't go on."
"I also remember the anti-Soviet, anti-occupation protest after the hockey game on 28 March 1969, which took place here in Smetana Park. There was a Soviet army HQ there. The story is well-known and has been publicised. What happened was that a Soviet major was scared for his life because we were throwing mud and stones at the house, making it look like Uncle Tom's Cabin, and he took a machine gun out of the window and fired over our heads. I got so scared I had to get out of there fast. I only found out later what actually went down. The people went there spontaneously; it wasn't organised. My uncle Tonda Scholz immediately composed a song: 'Our hockey players rock, whether they're playing at home or away. They're going at the Russians from the start, they gave them three bananas. Everybody feels happy with us when Zinger has the puck in the net, that was a great goal!' And that's how we marched to Smetana Square with the Czechoslovak flag. There were two trucks, a GAZ and a motorcycle with a sidecar parked there. They were prepared for something like that to happen. And right by the door there was a Romani guy named Josef Gulyas, he was a painter's apprentice from the chemical plant. The door opened and the Russian caught him. Gulyas was tiny. He pulled him in and said, 'Tell your people to go away, they have nothing to do here.' And he said, 'I don't understand, I don't understand, I don't understand.' So he pushed him out and the door closed again. You know, Russians are messy and dirty, and there had been a thaw so the stairs were caked with mud. The Soviet commander wanted to defuse the situation somehow, so he took an automatic rifle in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other: 'Okay, folks, let's drink to your national team!' But as there was mud, he slipped and accidentally fired a shot in the air. Then, Gulyas and two friends opened the vehicles - you know, good old wartime petrol trucks - opened their fuel tanks, put some cotton in and basically set the whole thing on fire."
"Then they started to weave these strange nets around me... I learned from the mayor's secretariat that the party had inquired if there was anyone to replace me because I would be arrested that afternoon. They said I had received the money for the trip from the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft, that they were paying me and that I was selling them secret information. It was confirmed from two sources that I would be arrested that afternoon. We had a citizen file dating back to the First Republic in the archives whereas other archives had discarded them because the Defence Intelligence Service seized them in search for war criminals. We got it in 1970 because the chief secret police officer here was one colonel Jiří Čmuchař. Maybe he's still around. He had studied archival science and knew that it was priceless from a demographic point of view, but nobody was allowed to browse it. Only when they were checking someone's identity, the StB officers had to fill out a research form, then I looked it up for them, they photocopied it, and it was put back in storage again. They were registered as researchers. I had contact to one major, I think his name was Jiří Svoboda, in fact I still remember his number: two, five, two, five, two. I called him, skipped the 'comrade' salute that was the norm then, and said: 'Major, they want me here... I don't need to go to West Germany. I don't care. I just I don't want to get picked off the train at the border and be held in a cage.' - 'Don't worry, Mr. Kaiser, I'll take care of it.' He called me back twenty minutes later: 'Go ahead with the trip. It was comrade Kumf's initiative, but we're not having fools like her play Pinkertons here.' Then he asked me for a favour: 'Now that you're going, we want to see if you can help us a bit.' I said, 'What do you need?' - 'Well, Dr. Lotz lives in an apartment building. We need the names of his neighbours who own apartments there. Then we need the embassies and consulates in Bonn.' I worked around it beautifully. When I arrived, he asked: 'Okay, what do you have?' I said, 'For the embassies, I got you a copy of Falk's Bonn city map from the city information office. They are all shown in it. As for the names, I don't remember them clearly. They were all some Iranian doctors with weird names I was unable to memorise.' I got away with it, just barely."
Archivist, writer and pilgrim Vladimír Kaiser was born in Střekov, a part of Ústí nad Labem, on 10 June 1954 in a house built by his railwayman grandfather. He came from a family of miners who worked at the Prokop Holý mine in Tuchomyšl and the Jaroslav mine in Proboštov near Teplice. He first saw how the regime dealt with anti-state opponents while still a high school student during the rigid normalisation era. In 1969, he took part in an anti-Soviet demonstration on Lidické Square in Ústí nad Labem after the Czechoslovak ice hockey team won the World Championship in Sweden. At the age of sixteen, he parted ways with the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren and continued to develop his relationship with God on an individual level. He studied archive studies and history at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. In 1979 he joined the District Archive in Ústí nad Labem and became the head of the institution five years later. In his leading position, the pressure on him to join the Communist Party intensified, to which he eventually succumbed. He became a party member in 1988. He did not surrender his party membership immediately after the Velvet Revolution; instead, influenced by his friend from the student times, Miloslav Ransdorf, he naively believed that the Communist Party could be reformed from within. He attended an extraordinary congress of the Communist Party in December 1989 as a guest. What he witnessed there disgusted him so much that he wrote a critical article about the congress in Průboj, the regional daily of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and exited the party. As penance for his communist past, Vladimír Kaiser made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 2003. The pilgrim life enchanted him. He logged a total of seven and a half thousand kilometres and ruined four pairs of shoes. He and his wife, historian Kristina, raised their son Vojtěch. During his lifetime, Vladimír Kaiser wrote and co-authored several books. In 2023, he lived in Ústí nad Labem. We were able to record the story of the memorial thanks to support from the city of Ústí nad Labem.
The witness with his parents in Střekov (his father worked as a miner at the Prokop Holý mine in Tuchomyšl, his mother, an accountant by profession, was a housewife between 1954 and 1969)
The witness with his parents in Střekov (his father worked as a miner at the Prokop Holý mine in Tuchomyšl, his mother, an accountant by profession, was a housewife between 1954 and 1969)
A trip to Boubín, 1980. ("When my wife came for a visit, she was not allowed in the Boletice military facility where I served in 1979-1980, so I was given a permit to leave the garrison. It had to wear my uniform. This one wasn't a very good fit.")
A trip to Boubín, 1980. ("When my wife came for a visit, she was not allowed in the Boletice military facility where I served in 1979-1980, so I was given a permit to leave the garrison. It had to wear my uniform. This one wasn't a very good fit.")
The witness delivers the opening speech at the exhibition "Nordböhmische Landschaft in der Romantik" at the Sudeten German House in Munich on 4 September 1991. The exhibition was the first official joint event of the Czech and Sudeten German institutions
The witness delivers the opening speech at the exhibition "Nordböhmische Landschaft in der Romantik" at the Sudeten German House in Munich on 4 September 1991. The exhibition was the first official joint event of the Czech and Sudeten German institutions
The unveiling of a memorial plaque to the mayor of Ústí nad Labem, Leopold Pölzel, in Aussiger Platz in Munich, late September 1996. In the middle is Gertraud Burkert, the Mayor of Munich, and at right is Hans-Jochen Vogel, Chairman of the German Social Democrats from 1987 to 1991.
The unveiling of a memorial plaque to the mayor of Ústí nad Labem, Leopold Pölzel, in Aussiger Platz in Munich, late September 1996. In the middle is Gertraud Burkert, the Mayor of Munich, and at right is Hans-Jochen Vogel, Chairman of the German Social Democrats from 1987 to 1991.
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!
