"Well, compared to that [the remand detention in České Budějovice], those Bory, those chatons, it was a nightmare. That was a cell with twenty-five people in it. At one point, I was even in a cell where there were thirty of us. We slept on bunk beds, narrow alleys and a toilet in the middle, which was covered but... And above all, the work, it was work I was not used to. I was assigned as a grinder. It's a good thing they made me a grinder because if I'd been a putty man, I don't think I would have ever learned it. A grinder had to work at the pace of the machine all the time. I was only poking the machine and pulling out five-kilo pieces. There was water splashing around. If it wasn't been done at that pace, it would actually ruin the whole product, and the whole group would be punished. The arrangement was that if someone didn't keep up, the fellow prisoners would beat him up."
"Of those priests, I was most often with František Lízna because we lived in the same building. We used to meet there. And then we shared an experience together. One day, we were summoned to an office. Václav Havel was sitting there with his cellmate František Valeš. And Václav Havel told us that he had been offered to sign a plea for clemency and that if he signed it, it would be granted. The stetsecs and the guards were sitting there. He said he had asked for a condition to consult with three friends, so there were the three of us. Valeš advised him to sign it. František Lízna and I advised him not to sign anything, that they would use it against him and that he would devalue what he had already sacrificed. Because we were afraid... They had already used it against him once when he made a statement, and then they used it as an argument that he had broken his promise. Well, that's how it ended up.... That was on some occasion... At that time, the [Austrian] Chancellor Bruno Kreisky was supposed to come to Bohemia and somehow intercede for Václav Havel. So Václav Havel took our advice and didn't sign anything. But then he fell quite seriously ill. He had pneumonia. I was in the sick room with him for a while. I was recovering from a cold at the time. They brought him in - I think it was a Saturday or during the weekend. He had a high fever. He could hardly breathe. Then the next day, I turned to the guard, the officer who was in charge, and I told him to do something about it or [Václav Havel] would die. Then they actually started doing something about it. But in the meantime - I found out about this later - the foreign radio was already talking about it, so someone else had passed the news out. Indeed, Václav Havel was taken to the Military Hospital, and a few days later, he was released for medical reasons. So we said it was good that he didn't sign the plea back then because in the end, he was released anyway, even though it was connected with these complications."
"The trial with VONS [the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted] was held in autumn. And then there was a brief period of lull in the persecution because–I have a feeling–the Communists didn't expect the repercussions it would have in the world, and it caused them diplomatic complications. Then the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. And we celebrated a sort of exuberant New Year's Eve in 1979, sending, for example, a postcard to Babrak Karmal [president of Afghanistan, installed by the Soviets in December 1979]. It was a Trnka postcard with teddy bears shooting from a cannon, and it said 'Pane, pojďte si hrát' [Hey, Mister, let's play!]. And we made a bulletin board with an acorn ace in connection with Gustav Husák because he resembled the acorn ace in one of his official portraits, where the cat is frowning. And we made various collages like that. Sometime after the New Year, the stetsecs stormed in and took me away for questioning. I think the company wasn't there anymore. Well, they put me in the CPZ [pre-trial detention cell] and then forced me to tell them who made the bulletin board with Husák. I lost my nerve a bit, so I said I did it, even though it wasn't entirely true or only partially true. And it made them happy to finally have a confession. They wrote down that it was a defamation of the President of the Republic. There was a special section for that. So they took me to Prosecutor Vyhnálek. He was an old lawyer. He also had a decent education, pre-February [1948], but his reputation among the farmers in the 1950s was not the best. Nevertheless, he spoke to me very kindly. He asked if I had actually made the bulletin board. I said, 'No, I didn't. I confessed on purpose.''Well, there you go!' In the end, he brushed off the whole accusation, and they let me go. The CPZ was in the basement of the courthouse, and they didn't have it equipped for longer stays, so there was no toilet, you had to go on the bucket. There was a bunk bed with a few blankets on it. Uniformed policemen would come up to me and ask me, 'What would you like for lunch?' They would bring me the menu from Slavie and go to Slavie to get my lunch. I was somewhat of a curiosity to them."
"Freedom is a tremendously important thing. It is hard to gain, easy to lose. And the quickest way to lose freedom is to start expecting politicians and the state to provide us with a happy life. Because politics can only create space for people to act freely, but it cannot by itself ensure happiness or prosperity. Too much reliance on the state, on authority, leads to a loss of that freedom and prosperity in the end anyway."
"I know the Russians came there. That was Malinovsky's army. For one thing, all the women were hiding from them... The usual stories that they were stealing watches and wherever they could find, that's just the way it was... But they brought a lot of German prisoners with them and made a sort of makeshift camp for them, that is, they just gathered them there and guarded them, then took them away somewhere. I don't know what happened to them. The prisoners were terribly hungry. I remember there was always this grey line at the pump, pumping water and taking it away. When my grandmother brought food to the pigs, they would rush over and eat it all. Then my mother always buttered a slice of bread and sent me out. I took one bite and gave them the bread. It repeated like that a few times, but then a Russian guy stood there with a machine gun and called to my mother and said, 'If you send that boy here again, I'll shoot him.'"
"Dad was threatened with a trial for sabotage at the time. That was back in Slaný. They assigned him an eager intern. He had her redrawing drawings. She was such a hard worker, and skilled, so she did everything quickly and asked for more work. He thanked her and said she'd done enough. He told her to take a book and read. I don't know if she deliberately denounced him or just said it out of plainness in front of some official. Daddy was facing trial for sabotage at the time. They told him back then he was lucky they arrested [Rudolf] Slánský. That perhaps the prosecutor was somehow involved with Slánský, so in the end, there was no prosecution."
“Martin Palouš tried to talk me into becoming spokesman for the Charter already in 1986. At the time I was still on probation though, so I didn’t want to risk it. But I promised that if necessary, I would take on the role the following year, which is what happened.”
“The explosive was placed in the cellar, on a barrel right by the entrance. It was wrapped in a rag, just like that. The fuses had been discarded at a different place. The investigator later told me it wouldn’t have even worked.”
“I remember the joy with which we welcomed the Red Army. One soldier say me on a horse and led me round the church. Then they herded in a swarm of German captives, they set up a camp for them on the meadows downhill from the village. They’d come to us for water because we had a good well, which had enough water in it. I vaguely remember the soldiers as a kind of grey crowd. I’d go out by the back gate to the clearing we had, and there’d be a Red soldiers with a sub-machine gun guarding the captives. They were famished, so when Grandma gave scraps to the pigs, they’d run up and take the food from her bucket and eat it.”
Jan Litomiský, an agronomist, dissident and politician, was born on 19 August 1943 in Prague and grew up in a villa in Podolí in an evangelical family that attended a church in Nusle. His mother‘s family came from the village of Vyskytná near Pelhřimov, where, as a young boy, Jan experienced the end of the war. In the early 1950s, he witnessed the communist persecution of private farmers here. He graduated from the eleven grade school on Jeremenkova Street and the University of Agriculture. After graduating from school and completing his basic military service, he started working as an agronomist in the JZD (Unified Agricultural Cooperative - transl.) Vyskytná. At the same time, he commuted to Prague, where he attended Ivan Medek‘s music lectures and socialized with spiritually oriented personalities of the Evangelical and Catholic Church. During the Prague Spring, he joined the Czechoslovak People‘s Party. After the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, he voted against the party resolution in support of the „temporary“ stay of the occupying troops and left the party. Although he did not pass the post-war vetting of cooperative officials, he was able to stay in the JZD Vyskytná until 1975. He then got a job as an agronomist in the cooperative in Dolní Cerekev. He was in contact with people from religious circles and the political opposition. In January 1977, he signed the Charter 77 declaration, and in 1979, he became a member of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted. This led to intensified police surveillance and house searches. In 1980, he was arrested and charged with defamation of the head of state. In the same year, another search was carried out, during which the police planted pornographic materials in his house and discovered a small amount of explosives of unknown origin. In February 1981, Jan Litomiský was arrested and subsequently sentenced to three years in prison for subversion of the Republic (the charges of endangering morality and illegal arming were dropped during the investigation). He was imprisoned for most of the three years in Bory, Pilsen. His release was followed by two years of protective supervision, during which he was not allowed to leave the Vyskytná municipality and worked as a forestry labourer. He then married his current wife, Barbara Litomiská, and worked, among other things, as a heating engineer at the Axa Hotel in Prague. In the second half of the 1980s, he received a scholarship from Western supporters of Czechoslovak dissent to translate the writings of Martin Luther. In 1987, he was a spokesman for Charter 77. He was involved in the Movement for Civil Liberty. After the events of November 1989, he was co-opted to the Municipal National Committee in Pelhřimov for the Civic Forum and as a deputy to the Czech National Council. He was at the founding of the Christian Democratic Party. He stayed in the parliament until 1996, first as a deputy for the Christian Democratic Party, and after the merger with ODS (Civic Democratic Party - transl.), he joined the Civic Democrats. From 1997 to 2006, he worked as head of the State Social Support Department at the Labour Office in Pelhřimov. Then, until 2010, he was the Government Commissioner for Human Rights. In 2002, he was awarded the Medal of Merit.
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!
