František Klišík

* 1963

  • "I was mostly in the Civic Forum in Prachatice. In the beginning we had quite a say. People listened to us, we also had something to say because we knew about things and they didn't. Later on there were some, not Czechoslovak Socialist Youth Union members perhaps, but strange patrons, they didn't listen to us much anymore either. Suddenly I realized that my role in this revolution was to be in the resistance, to be against something. When it became legal and these situations came into it, I said, 'What am I going to throw pearls to swine?' I gave up, I stopped going to meetings. But they've made it on their own. Then I was ashamed in front of Havel. He always said we had to go for it at all costs and not back down. I backed down. I didn't go into politics. But I couldn't - a man who comes out of the seventh grade can't hold any public job position. Nor did I want to. For these reasons also I soon backed out."

  • "Those who remember the revolution have not experienced it. I remember almost nothing, it was such a rush! We founded the first Civic Forum in Prachatice the very next day, we didn't know it was a Civic Forum yet. We knew that it had exploded. In the evening I made little leaflets on a cyclostyle copier, and we stuck them all over Prachatice: 'At five o'clock at the fountain, who doesn't like that they are beating up students.' But Míra Crh was closed, Oliver Kucka was late somewhere and I was the only one there. There were people in the arcade in Prachatice who wanted to come to the fountain but were afraid to. It was already five o'clock, I thought: 'There's no one here, so it's up to me.' I got over it, climbed up on that fountain and shouted, 'People, don't be afraid, we're going to them!' The first to come, the one who was the least afraid, was the Prague gallery. There were already twenty people, then thirty. But by that time the State Security officers had already come running, they started chasing me. I was running around the fountain, shouting: 'You see the injustice!' I tried to break through people's fear: 'Fear is natural. I'm afraid too. But we have to face it!' Soon, there were a lot of people there and they started to protect me. By then the cops didn't dare to take me down. I spoke there, in a voice crooked with stage fright, but I gave it. For the first time in my life I spoke to a crowd."

  • "I have to boast that I came out of the seventh grade, just like my twin brother Ondrej. I will tell the story as it was. Not that we were stupid, no. I was a good boy in first grade, even writing homework. In second grade we got a different teacher, she was such a Bolshevik bitch, I won't say her name. She bullied us. It's true that we were the Slovaks, we came home, and into sweatpants, to herd cows. One winter - sometimes we walked to school, there were two-meter drifts - my mother left us pajamas and put clothes on top of them. We had gym class, and the kids were taunting us: 'Gee, look at the Klišíks! Their hands are dirty. They're wearing pyjamas!' The teacher took us outside and slapped us. We didn't know why. We were like, 'And you know what, Ondra, I'm never gonna write any more homework.' 'And neither am I.' 'And I'm not gonna study anymore.' 'And neither am I.' I think I would have given up myself, but the two of us stuck it out. I only wrote a few essay assignments in the whole school, and I always got an F in grammar and an A in essay."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Plzeň, 20.06.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 03:44:01
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

My role was resistance, being against something

František Klišík in 2023
František Klišík in 2023
zdroj: Pilsen studio

František Klišík was born on 3rd May 1963 in Prachatice, he has a twin brother Ondrej. His father Ondrej Klišík and mother Antonie Horelicová were Slovaks from Romania, they grew up in Transylvania. They immigrated to Czechoslovakia during the settlement of the borderlands after the expulsion of the Germans. František Klišík prompted his father to write a memoir in which he describes life in his native Nový Šastelek and later in Stögr Hut near Volary. Stögrova Hut‘ changed from a village with a pub, a sawmill, a mill and a power station to a settlement with only a few houses, where only a few permanent inhabitants live, the brothers František and Ondřej Klišík are the last descendants of Slovaks from Romania. At school, the brothers from a poor family who could not speak Czech were bullied, so they disregarded it and dropped out of the seventh grade. Frantisek, like his brother Ondrej, trained as a bricklayer. After the war he joined the Lesostavby company, then went to work in a panel factory in Prague‘s Zahradní Město. In Prague, he lived in a community of little girls, got to know the authors of dissent, the philosopher Jan Patočka, the writer Egon Bondy, and the band The Plastic People of the Universe. In 1987, he returned to Šumava and lost his right arm in a sawmill accident. At the end of the 1980s he was active, together with Miroslav Crha, in the Movement for Civil Freedom (HOS) and the South Bohemian Dissent. After 17 November 1989, he helped to establish Civic Forums in towns and villages in the region. He soon left politics, as he was more comfortable with the role of „being against something“, and with seven years of primary school he did not feel up to public job position. Together with his brother Ondrej, they became one of the heroes of Aleš Palán‘s book „Rather go mad in the wilderness“. He lives with his brother in his family home in Stögrův Hut, earns extra money as a bricklayer, and organizes occasional concerts and exhibitions there.