František Nekvinda

“Karel Kyncl appeared at the Communist Party municipal committee. Later, he became a BBC reporter. Karel Kyncl Award is being awarded now, and all journalists know who Karel Kyncl was. He was reporting from London, and I used to listen to his broadcasts. I was thus able to listen to these two speeches. I was copying them on a copy paper. There were no other means of copying at that time. There was the ormik machine or the manifold machine, but all stencils had to be registered and archived. StB was conducting inspections, and it was not easy to cheat, because each stencil had a registration number and if they found that one was missing, it obviously gave them grounds for prosecution. I was thus copying it on a copy paper. You could do ten copies, but the tenth one was barely legible, and the first one was damaged by the typewriter, as if the letters were typed through. So, it was hard work. When I created a few pamphlets like this, it was drudgery. I was copying this speech by Karel Kyncl and doctor Kriegel, and in order to increase its impact over a larger area than just my immediate surroundings, I would be riding trains at night, mostly the express train from Choceň to Pardubice, and whenever we passed through a station, I would go to the last car and throw out some pamphlets from of the window of the lavatory.”

“The best teachers I knew got kicked out. They dismissed teacher Morávka, he was then working in the cooperative and carrying bags. When we met him on our way to school, we would always greet him, and with the bag over his shoulders he would nod his head. Teacher Háb was working in a quarry. He actually got dismissed twice. Later, he even got promoted to work in an administrative position in that quarry. Another person to be dismissed was teacher Kmenta. He was a man of a very weak body. He was short and weak, and he was then carrying bricks to the brick kiln in Polička. His wife got dismissed from her job. She was earning her living by knitting sweaters. She was earning about two hundred and fifty crowns a month. Teacher Krejcar was dismissed, too. He was the one who had sent me for the twigs, when I discovered the hidden gun there. He was driving a tractor in the local agricultural cooperative. He was nearly two metres high. It was difficult for him to bend his legs in order to fit into the tractor driver’s seat. He was wearing a hat on his head, it was the type of hat nicknamed Russian forushka or Masaryk hat. He would always greet us, with a cigarette holder without a cigarette in his mouth. He was a typical character with that cigarette holder and hat, and his tractor. We always said hello to him. I also attended his funeral, of course.”

“I got dismissed from school after 1968, too. We had to undergo examination. Each of us was biting the tip of the pen and thinking what to write. It was partly my own response that got me kicked out, because in the questionnaire we were given, I wrote precisely this: ´As for the questions 1 through 10 in this questionnaire: I believe that this questionnaire itself stands for an unprecedented campaign in the Czechoslovak education system. Based on my previous experience, I am not convinced that this questionnaire will serve for objective evaluation of our professional and moral qualifications, but merely as an instrument for possible repression. For this reason I ask your understanding for my distrust to this campaign, and for the reasons for my refusal to take part in it.´ I signed the paper and handed it to them, and I was out in the twinkling of an eye."

“I was still a little boy at that time. All the older people were telling me: ´You cannot remember anything.´ But, I do have some fragmented memories from the end of the war. I remember when they shot a Vlasov army soldier in front of our house. He had blond hair. He was about eighteen. I nearly walked out to the gunfire. My mom grabbed me and quickly took me home. I ran out in front of the house again, and I saw wonderfully yellow sand there. A child and sand, that just goes together. I scooped this wonderfully yellow sand with my hands, and all of a sudden my hands were all covered with blood. Mom ran to me and washed my hands, because this sand had been used to cover the blood of this Vlasov soldier.”