"I had to cross the square because the Baptists had a villa around the corner a little further on with a prayer room downstairs. There was a gathering of people in the square. As you said, Ivan Vyskočil [and Michal David] appeared there but were not allowed to plug their PA in by any of those shops - it was all under the State Security influence. I watched what was going on for a while, of course just out of curiosity, but I also saw that things were obviously changing in a way because the actors in Prague and all the other things... we knew them and had seen them on the news. Since they weren't allowed to plug in anywhere, up came a gentleman who I didn't know until then. He was the head of this youth centre just off the square, there's a cinema there today. They had a room or what. It was meant for young people, ČSSM, and he said he would take them there. So this crowd of young people, it was actually a mix of people, went towards the house where we were going to have a meeting where these actors could talk it was in the evening. Now, when we got there, it turned out that he wasn't allowed to do it again. He was forbidden to do it because, I don't know how, but he was connected to the party or to these institutions somehow since he was the head of the place. And so, as it happens, I had this idea and I said, 'Well, I'll take you to church, nobody can forbid me to do it,' so the crowd turned around and we went to church."
"I was sitting at the head office with a colleague whose daddy used to teach me transport at school. The boy, or man at that time of course, was in the party and in the militia. I was nothing. The chairwoman of the Communist Party came to me to ask me to join the party. She said I was young... and all this talk like they did back then. It made me sick... I knew [that] with my ear gone, I couldn't work the service. With me there were a number of colleagues most of whom had studied during the Protectorate and then went to work on the railway when they got married and never got back to their studies. Some of them were in the party and some were not, but it was a rather nice environment in which I enjoyed working. I wasn't sure. If I said 'yes' to the party, it would no longer be 'Let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No' for me. If I said 'no', what would they do to me...? I said, give me the statutes to read. It was stuck in my head at home for a week - what do I do? I didn't read the statutes - I knew what they were like. So when the chairwoman came back, I came clean and I said, 'You know, I'm a religious person, we live in a congregation - and that would be hypocritical because it doesn't play well with the terms in the party,' and I've had peace ever since."
"In 1938... He [Dad] was also born in 1914, just like Mom, so he was twenty-four. He was assigned to Děčín from Liberec after graduation. It was in Děčín that he experienced the attacks of German - we would say 'terrorists' today. He showed me the place - I still remember it - of the school in Děčín where three Czech policemen stayed on guard and were attacked by the Werwolves or what they were called. It was a sabre fight. He almost got his leg cut. And he said, 'For the first time in my life... I remember I split one's head open with a sabre.'"
František Pavlis was born in Prague on 5 December 1941 to Marta Pavlisová, née Bočková, and František Pavlis. His father experienced the occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938 as a student of the police academy in Liberec. He was dismissed from the police force as a member of the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party in February 1948. He then worked as a garbage collector for the Czechoslovak State Railways. František Pavlis was brought up in a Christian spirit. He completed a business high school in Děčín in 1955 and served as a dispatcher for the Czechoslovak State Railways until 1963. He was later employed directly in the operations department in Ústí nad Labem as a process technician and later as a dispatcher. Following the communist screening (after 1968), he withdrew and completed the Comenius Evangelical Theological Faculty in Prague in 1975. In April 1975 he married Radmila, née Pellarová, and they raised three children together. After that he served for three years as a vicar in Merklín near Přeštice, then as a parish priest in Čáslav and finally in Sokolov where he played an important role in the Velvet Revolution. On Friday, 24 November 1989, he allowed the local people into the church so messengers from Prague could inform them about the events in Prague. He was elected to the Sokolov Municipal Assembly on behalf of the Civic Forum in the 1991 elections and he also worked as the municipal authority secretary. Later on, he worked at the Czech Railways headquarters, then as a parish priest in Karlovy Vary, Ostrov nad Ohří and again in Merklín. He finished his clerical activity in 2018. At the time of the filming in 2024, he was living with his wife Radmila in Plzeň.
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!
