Ilja Kuneš

* 1956

  • "I knew about Svědectví, of course. When I was in France in 1981 for a summer school, on the trains that went to Prague - the Western Express - the emigrants handed out Svědectví, Listy, things that were published outside. I smuggled it into Bohemia. I knew the address. I didn't want anyone to feel obliged to help me; I didn't go to Svědectví until April 1983, after four months in exile, with a cheque for 120 francs to subscribe. It was located on the second floor. A very elegant gentleman of gentlemanly style opened the door, asked and I answered. It was Pavel Tigrid. He said, 'You don't have to pay any subscription, come here to take the Testimony.' That was the first meeting. After that I went there regularly, and Tigrid impressed me very much. It wasn't just his absolutely perfect Czech, after forty years of emigration it wasn't outdated, but refined. And the second thing that fascinated me was that I had the impression that he had left Czechoslovakia a fortnight ago. He was able to completely empathize with the situation. I later met a bunch of emigrants who left after 1968, and they stagnated in that year. Everything that happened after that, they just read somewhere. With Tigrid, I had the impression that he had experienced everything himself."

  • "Then a German friend came up with the idea that the best way to get to France was by plane. So we went to Vienna and watched it happen. Everybody who got on the plane had their passports checked to see if they had visas. If the airline smuggled someone in, they had to fly them back at their own expense. We were discussing it at the hotel in the evening, and he bought tickets to Paris the next day and said: 'Well, what are the officials here afraid of, who are they afraid of?' I said: 'Maybe a lawyer.' He said: 'No, a journalist, I'm going to be a journalist.' I vowed that I would not associate with anyone in the West until I was on my own two feet. I didn't want my friends to feel they had to help me. But here I had to break it. What if we get to Paris and they don't let us out of transit to France? I called my friend in France to see what the odds were that we would be released from transit. He said, 'Where are you?' I told him briefly. The next day at the airport, my German friend went straight to the head of passport control. He described to him that he was a freelance journalist preparing a report for Der Spiegel weekly about how the authorities in the West treat refugees from the East. He outlined that he had been hearing all nice proclamations, but now he wanted to see the reality. And that he is particularly interested in our case because we are his friends from Czechoslovakia and he wants to follow our story. Then he went on to the essence of our situation: 'They want to go to Paris, they have tickets and passports, but they don't have visas in them.' The head of passport control commented on his speech with the words 'natürlich' and 'keine Probleme'. Then he called the people who were checking the passports to let us in. And we were on the plane."

  • "When I started school, I was completely fooled by ideology. I was a proud little sparkle and then a pioneer. My parents weren't in the party, but they didn't talk me out of it. I guess they expected it to rot away with time. That was also my first political experience. That's when we were ceremoniously given a red scarf, and my friend and I went home in our white shirts, those new scarves, with a flower in our hands. Around the corner of our street, a group of ninth graders were waiting for us with water pistols and they shoved them at us, saying, 'We are punishing the Bolsheviks.' Fortunately, we agreed that it wouldn't be pioneer-like, that we'd rather have an educational effect on them."

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    Plzeň, 16.08.2023

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I wrote for Svědectví under the pseudonym Jan Otava

Ilja Kuneš in 2023
Ilja Kuneš in 2023
zdroj: Pilsen studio

Ilja Kuneš was born on 13 June 1956 in Sušice, spent his pre-school years here, then lived with his parents in Pilsen. His father Josef taught at the engineering college in Pilsen, in 1968 he headed the rehabilitation committee there, in the 1970s he was dismissed because of this, his mother Marie was a pulmonary doctor. In primary school he believed in communist ideology, was a „proud spark and a pioneer“, in 1968 he became a scout. In August 1968 he was on holiday in Bulgaria with his parents, many people stayed in Yugoslavia on the way back, his father refused a job offer from colleagues in Holland and the family returned to occupied Czechoslovakia. In 1971 he entered the Pionýrů Street Grammar School, now Masaryk Street, and recalls that the atmosphere of the 1960s lingered there. At the gymnasium he joined the Socialist Youth Union (SSM) and wanted to organise a concert by the folk singer and dissident Jaroslav Hutka, but the national committee did not allow it. Because of a boyish incident on a school trip, he and several classmates were charged with disorderly conduct and were not recommended for university. He enrolled in a two-year extension course at the school of tourism in Karlovy Vary, he and his classmate Jan Šváb distributed the Charter 77 document, and during the interrogation his classmate took the blame. Subsequently, he studied translation and interpreting at Charles University in Prague. During a four-week summer school in France, he decided to emigrate. Together with his wife Lucie, they managed to go on a ski trip to Austria, organized by Sportturist, and from Vienna they flew to Paris in January 1983. There he studied political science and worked as a night watchman. He collaborated with the exile quarterly for politics and culture Svědectví, contributed to it under the pseudonym Jan Otava, and became a member of its editorial board. After the Velvet Revolution, he contributed to Český deník and Týden magazine. He took a one-year course in computer graphics and began working in Paris for a company offering translations of exotic languages - Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and Czech. He spent ten years translating directives, regulations and other materials for the European Commission, and now offers clients translations of technical documentation or legal materials. He lives alternately in France and the Czech Republic, but says he understands the French environment better than the Czech one.