Vladislav Najbrt

“I got a call from my colleagues at Freedom Printing [Svoboda in Czech - trans.], where they had collected old original type casting fonts. Those were sets of letters ranging from two millimetres to large headline type. They had historical masterpieces there, inherited and preserved from western type foundries. So they phone me to take it all away and hide it in a barn somewhere, so they wouldn’t have to take it to the scrapyard. When printing shops were closed down, we were obliged to scrap non-ferrous metals - the fonts were from alloys. We had to hand them in, and all they checked were the number of tons, the weight of scrap metal. I told them I wouldn’t be locked up for that. They urged me to reconsider, said they’d protect me, that the gatekeeper wouldn’t write down my entry, so I could take it away. I explained that I didn’t steal, that I was a Christian and I didn’t steal on principle. My mum would have disowned me for that. So I couldn’t save those unique items. Not even later, in the days of digitalisation. They knew my focus on the history of printing, and they offered me machines that were supposed to be scrapped.”

“We even had one of those counterspies. They were trained to get to it through hobbies, like our printing shop’s football team. So he came to me - I won’t say names, even though I remember them - so anyhow, one of them told me he needed to get me in gym trousers. He was drunk, of course. They always took part in various meetings and company celebrations, and they were used to imbibing a bit. He told me to take him home, I had my car there. On the way he told me in his stupor that he needed to get me into prison so he could be promoted and become a colonel with merits and could take an early pension. Because that was his opportunity to get a pension and also get a so-called stripe benefit for being the rank of colonel. You got more money for that. It was all terribly primitive and evil.”

“He told me that the East Germans in Leipzig still maintained the tradition of letterpress printing, and in fact, that they kept to printing traditions there. There was a master craftsmanship school in Leipzig. He suggested I should send an application there, saying that I was a typesetter-designer and that I made posters and that I would like to improve my qualifications. I had to send a copy to the cadre department, where the personnel officer tried to persuade me that it was pointless and that we have our own school here, and that if I’m already taking evening courses here, why should I go galivanting to Leipzig - that I had no need for it. She just didn’t want to bother herself with another case, to have another problem that she would have to solve. So I wrote to the Ministry of Education. And just at the time when my dad was dying in hospital after a severe work injury, I got a letter informing me that they had approved and allowed me to study in the DDR, polygraphy, at the engineer’s school in Leipzig.”

“When the tanks and planes arrived on 21 August, we were on our way to Leipzig, where we were to have a meeting with the architectural institute. Then it was suddenly swarming with people from Czechoslovakia, and they told us that the country had been attacked. I was there with two officers, although they were in civvies, they were a colonel and a lieutenant colonel. Opinions started to get refined. Our colonels were aghast, worrying that the situation back home was dire, and they wanted to quickly go home. But some Communist functionaries from the architectural institute from the DDR came up and started persuading us along the lines of the Moscow-directed Warsaw Pact and Comecon. They said people in our country had become misguided. Lieutenant Colonel Růžička said I was good with letters, that we’d get some white paint, and we’d paint that there was no counter-revolution at home and that it was all a mistake.”

“It was a shock, a huge crossroads. I could only speak a little German, I took lessons, I’d learnt a bit from Dad, who could speak fluently. I waited to see what would happen, Mum waited to, but we weren’t nervous at all. I basically expected that they wouldn’t allow me to study when the cadre specialist was against it. But in the end, on the day my father died, I set off to Leipzig. I was afraid that the cadre specialists at the ministry would stop it, like they did with my previous studies, when they barred me from getting a higher degree of education. I wanted to study at UMPRUM [the Academy of Art, Architecture & Design - trans.], but I could only take drawing lessons, nothing else. So I didn’t know what I could get away with. Family came first for me, but Mum told me not to worry about the funeral. The body is just a physical matter, the soul is already in heaven, so I wasn’t to worry myself about it. She assured me that the funeral would be organised by my older brothers, that I shouldn’t feel bad about it and that I should go. So I got on the train in Masaryk Station and set off to Leipzig.”