"Imagine that the computers had to be estimated, it was not crucial how much I bought them for. Estimated by a forensic expert here. The three computers were estimated at one million crowns and taken by the Meteorological Institute of Modřany or Komořany or whatever it is called. And imagine that it had to be sold through a bazaar, which sold it. He kept something on it, I don't know how much. So the Prague people from Modřany came to Hradec Králové with rotten Dacia. They dropped a million crowns in cash to the bazaar, who then dropped it to me. And they were carrying a million crowns worth of goods with rotten donations, if a truck hit them, a million is gone down the drain."
"At work in Letňany, the head prisoner who divided up the work sent me to pull nails out of boards in this open area. And the 'boss' of the prisoners came to me and he had tea in a compote jar. He had a wire and a handle made out of the wire. He says, 'Do you want some tea?' I say, 'If you'll give me some.' So I took some and he said, 'Do you have something to smoke? I said, 'I don't.' In Pankrác, I used to pick up cigarette butts on the ground in the yard and we used to roll cigarettes out of the little remnant of tobacco. There was even a young boy living with us in Budějovice [in detention]. He was about seventeen, not yet of adult age. And he would tear the hairs off the blanket and he would wrap it in cigarette paper and smoke the hairs off the blanket. So I'll go back to Letňany. And so he gave me cigarettes, and the next day he got me a job operating a freight elevator. He provided me with a quilted warm coat. That wasn't a given. A guard was normally in military uniform, no matter how much it was over minus twenty degrees Celsius, so you only worked in military uniform. So he got me a coat. And then even the head of the prisoners, who distributed the work officially, so he got in contact with people. If it was industrial construction, or Construction of the City of Prague, or what I know, some company like that was building there with us. So he got in touch with them, so he arranged through this one guy to come over to my brother's place in Střešovice. My brother would always buy two or three cones of salami, marlboro and stuff like that, and the civilian would bring it to Letňany to the construction site and give it to us."
"My shop boss wrote me a terrible review when I was about to leave after '68. In '68 I was playing Czech Radio. When the Russians occupied us, I played it all over Paramo, various warnings. And he wrote it in my report. And the shop foreman who did the evening industrial with me, he was also a Bolshevik, stood up for me. He said to the manager: 'Do you realize you're liquidating this boy? Do you realise if someone writes this to your children?' So then he cancelled it."
Jaroslav Konvalina was born on 26 February 1944 in Dolní Rovňa. His parents owned an inn with a shop, which was nationalized by the regime in 1952. After his apprenticeship as a telephone installer, he joined Paramo in Pardubice. At the time of the occupation in August 1968, he played Czech Radio in Paramo Pardubice, which his supervisor wanted to write in his report. After moving to Prague, he worked as a greengrocer and briefly in the Czech Insurance Company. In 1977 he emigrated and the court sentenced him and his wife to two years and eighteen months imprisonment in absentia. In 1984 he legalized his stay in Germany and subsequently obtained an emigration passport. In 1985 he was imprisoned in Czechoslovakia for 14 months for smuggling goods. After his release, he completed a technical college in Germany. Before the revolution, he imported computers into Czechoslovakia and sold them. He returned to the Czech Republic in 1993. In 2024 he was living in Holice.
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!
