“In November 1975, the disciplinary board of the Electro-Engineering Faculty called me in. To cut a long story short, they said: ,Mr Kvapil, it has been brought to our attention that by singing anti-Soviet and anti-establishment songs in your youth club you have damaged this faculty’s reputation. You have been issued an official reprimand as a way of punishment.’ The sheet of paper with the reprimand was hanging on the notice board of the dean’s office for about two weeks. I thought that was that. In April, though, another summons to appear in front of the disciplinary board arrived. I think I may have suspected that something was badly wrong then. So, again I appear in front of the board and the old gentlemen, the professors, they informed me that new evidence had been brought to their attention and that I have been expelled from the university.”
“It must have been the beginning of the exam period, a workday, possibly May. I’d been revising for my exams at home. A car pulled up: ‘You’re coming with us for a hearing.’ ,Why?’ said I. They drove me to Ústí nad Orlicí, a higher floor in a high-rise. The interrogators treated me with complete respect. I had no idea what they wanted, what it is all about. My feeling from the hearing when I reflect on it now, forty-five years later, is that they tried to make me believe they knew everything about me.”
“I was fundamentally shaken when it happened. I hadn’t been thinking politically until then. Communist educators had raised me in the belief that the Soviet Union towers over everything else, they are our friends and want nothing but the best for us. And then one day I got woken by my crying mother who announced that a war had broken out. ,A war? What? How?’ And when she replied ,The Russians’, it took me a week to process this information. Naturally, my parents forbade me from leaving the house and searching for Soviet tanks in the streets; or from participating on subversive action with my future friends, who painted the words IVAN, GO HOME! across town. It took me a week to adjust. All my father did was listen to the radio. It was on his bedside table, I can still see it vividly.”
Jaroslav Kvapil was born on September 4, 1953, in Ústí nad Orlicí. He, his father Jaroslav (1927–1988), his mother Marie (1930–2013) and his five siblings lived in Kunčice u Letohradu. The family were religious, and the children were raised as hard-working Catholics. The year 1968 represented a milestone in Jaroslav’s personal trajectory. In his church, father František Karel launched guitar-led services accompanied by gospel-like singing, which appealed to a lot of young people. Jaroslav played the bass in the support band. The atmosphere of newly found freedom was interrupted by the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops, which thwarted the promising development. It was then that Jaroslav started to fully appreciate what went on in the country. After his grammar school studies, he started studying at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Brno-based Technical University. In the early 1970s in Letohrad, he joined a youth club which had become a shelter for the Scouts from a cancelled Scout centre. Alongside of this, he was also active in the life of Letohrad parish despite the onset of Normalisation. These activities soon attracted undesirable attention from State Security. In the summer of 1975, Jaroslav was called in for a hearing twice. In September of the same year, the youth club was forcefully disbanded and on April 12, 1976, Jaroslav Kvapil was expelled from university. Four other members of the youth club were likewise expelled. After his expulsion, Jaroslav immediately found a job at the OEZ in Letohrad (Orlice Electrotechnical Factory). He married Miroslava Adamcová in the same year and then started his two-year military service in České Budějovice. In the 1990s, he helped re-establish Orel, the Christian Sports Club in Letohrad. The Kvapils raised five children.
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