Doc. Václav Němec

„Oddly enough, before serving in the army, I was never jailed. Many times, I was in detention, though. Every day, the police stopped us, checked our IDs, reprimanded us that we shouldn’t play, we shouldn’t sing, we shouldn’t smile. In this sense, it was a terrible time. There was such a contrast of the cheerful, pure joy of life in the freedom-loving community and at the same time, the shadows cast by the everpresent police surveillance. Almost every evening in spring when we went and sung somewhere, we were checked, detaind, reprimanded and so on.”

”Maybe this could be an interesting story in connection with my mom, who was, as I had already said, a member of the Communist Party and as such, she is a supporter of [President] Miloš Zeman. She went through a major trauma. When I was in the army jail in Louny and they kept transferring me and my family had no idea where I was and what’s going on with me. They started to search for me, they went from one garrison to another….. At the end, they managed to find out via some contacts in the State Security or in the counterintelligence that I had ended up in Louny. After many days of searching, they arrived there and my mother met my superior and he told her that I am to be reached at some phone number – I was in jail but he did not tell her that. He gave her that phone number and she, hopeful that she has finally found me, went to the first phone booth and called that number. And, it was the crematorium in Louny which answered. So, he made this gallows joke but it was a terrible shock for my mom. Only when they released me after Christmas 1989 and I went back home via Karlovy Vary, she found out that I was fine and what was going on.”

„Back then, the commander in chief of the Slaný division was colonel Zdeněk Zbytek, an ambitious young officer aiming for a great career in the army. The whole division was scared of him. He had only one humane facet – in his youth, he had played in a big beat band. Wherever he came, he used his army authority and started a big beat band. I had played in a band with some guys at the Rakovník garrison, they got into the Slaný band and when they found out that I was in Slaný, I would join them for band practice after work. They made me their lead singer and then told colonel Zbytek that they have a singer for the band and he ordered that I stay in Slaný. Thus, by the orders of colonel Zdeněk Zbytek, I became a singer in a band which was directly subordinated to him. It was not an army band, it was a regular band which played at shindigs and socials, often army-related. The worst job was playing at parties where the officers would attend, they usually got drunk like skunks, we played for them and they danced and cavorted. Paradoxically, though, we had a great freedom, we could play what we wanted. We played the blacklisted authors as well. It often happened that the Communist army officers cavorted to Marta Kubišová or Pražský výběr; those were the absurdities of the time.”

„My experience with the attorneys‘ cabal in Plzeň taught me one thing. People cannot exert any change on their own, they need to join their forces, they need to get organised. For this reason, I became involved in grassroots activism because if you want to change anything, you need to have at least a small group of enthusiastic and and passionate coworkers. And my experience is, when it is done well and in a clever way, many things can be indeed changed, or many things can e prevented at least. I consider this an extremely valuable experience. I am well aware that in democracy, freedom is not only private, as many people understood wrongly in the 1990’s, as in, we can travel wherever want, we can enjoy life as we want, we can run our businesses as we want. This freedom means political freedom. It can be accomplished only through a political activity, political debate. It is possible in partisan politics, when one is a member of a political party, has some elected function, or, when partisan politics and people in it fail, then it is even more pressing that people themselves become involved in grassroots organisations. It is politics sui generis which can be very authentic as the tradition of non-political politics in the best sense of the word, in the Havlíček, Masaryk and Havel line. [Karel Havlíček Borovský, a journalist and poet active in the 19th century; Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first Czechoslovak president and before, an university professor; Václav Havel, the Czechoslovak and later Czech president after the Communist regime was overthrown.] It becomes even more pressing when democracy and the statespeople, who should act within the borders of the demorcatic systems – and they don’t, when they simply fail. And that’s unfortunately our situation today.”