“I dared not to sign Anticharter in Military Design Institute because I was offended that someone was making me sign an article saying I was condemning something, and they did not let me read it. That is why I risked it and did not sign it as the only one out of eighty people. You know, it was the Military Design Institute, we designed for example Semtín and I was for instance not allowed to go abroad. It was a risk, and I was curious what would happen. But because it was no longer in the 1950s, the Chairman of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the comrade Lieutenant Colonel came to see me and told me that I did not sign it and we would not talk about it again.”
“I had to explain his (Jan Palach´s) actions to myself, why he had done it, what meaning it had. We were already university students; we were not stupid and discussed it from dawn till dusk. We understood the meaning of his actions very quickly and we organized two buses from Brno to Prague. I attended his funeral and was standing on the Old Town Square where there were an estimated eighty thousand people. You could have heard a pin drop and when the procession was marching through the square, you could only hear the shuffling of feet and walking. A complete silence and as a poet wrote it was a deafening silence. That is accurate. It was a profound experience.”
“My mum was invited to see various flats. The door opened, and there were beds made, candlesticks, and photos of grandparents, parents and children on the walls, and my mum said she did not feel up to it and had to leave. That was a general reaction. People refused to move in there (to the houses left behind by Germans). So, they did so-called collections in a local cinema. They put beds on one side and tables on the other, and people could buy them for five or ten crowns and furnish their houses again. The feeling of belonging disappeared, and it no longer mattered those had been German houses."
Jan Klimeš was born on 9 September 1947 to a family of builders of communism Jan Klimeš and Miroslava Klimešová. The family settled in a house left behind by Germans in Mohelnice. The 1950s meant a happy childhood to him and he did not start to perceive the other side of communism until secondary industrial school. When he started studying Architecture in Brno in 1966, he was surprised by its low level and pro-regime education. August 1968 and the Soviet occupation brought a big disillusion to Jan Klimeš´s father. Jan Klimeš still considers the self-immolation of Jan Palach in 1969 the most formative and profound experience of his life. He attended his funeral and a year later organized a commemorative event on the anniversary of his death on Liberty Square in Brno. In 1977 he was the only one of eighty colleagues who did not sign the so-called Anticharter. His three children were born during Husák´s normalization and he adopted a Roma boy in the 1990s. The Velvet Revolution meant creative and personal freedom for him which he used during many important regional projects in his Green House Studio.
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!
