"I got into the coordination centre of the Civic Forum, which was actually something that managed the Velvet Revolution. Well, managed, that's such an ugly word, by natural authority. So I used to go to the so-called Špalíček, where the coordination centre was located. I guess they didn't want to use the worlds central committee, it was profaned. And I started going to make the revolution. I mean, those were the so-called threesomes, a student, an actor and an ecologist. That was me. And they went around the villages and they were telling what had actually happened on that Národní Street and that it was already irreversible and how we imagine it and join us and so on."
"I can't leave out one thing, which I'm not ashamed of, but which, if I put it bluntly, declassifies me as a free-thinking person in a certain opposition to the regime of the time, is that I kind of helped the regime, in quotation marks, by having to found the Socialist Youth Union organization with a bunch of people. Because the ministry found out that there were only two members of the Communist Party in that institute of ours, and they were old people. None of the young people. Well, first there was persuasion, which of course I refused. So then they said to me, 'Look, it's bad with you, you'll probably have to quit because you refused to join the Communist Party as the vanguard of our society.' Well, so we discussed it, and then in the year seventy-four, or during the time of normalization it was, really. But it's captured in films today, I watched Pelíšky yesterday, you know, I hope. So the movement started under the Socialist Youth union patronage, Brontosaurus. And we were hesitant, or I was hesitant, but then when I found out that my friends from the faculty were there, because it was started at the Institute of Ecology and Landscape of the Academy of Sciences, that there were a lot of young people your age involved in it. That the then weekly magazine Young World (Mladý svět), that was something incredible in those days of the normalization, so, like, free-thinking. That we said, look, we'll do it too. So we joined the movement, we signed up for it."
"And it was only in the year sixty-six that I really travelled to Germany, then the German Democratic Republic, to Dresden. And it was only in the 1960s, in 1964 and 1969, when I was studying, when there was a bit freer atmosphere in Czechoslovakia, which ended with the Prague Spring, I don't know if you're learning this, that we could really almost, almost travel freely. As students. That is, through the youth travel agency, we got seventeen dollars for maybe a month. So I survived by drinking water and eating sugar. So we could go almost all over Western Europe. All we had to do there was to meet somebody who wrote me for the next year as an invitation, which was a bit of a cheat. So I traveled those five years in college and I remember it as a miracle. Then the 1980s came, it closed down, and that was it."
Václav Petříček was born on 29 December 1944 in Mladá Boleslav into a family that practiced the Christian faith. He knew from an early age that he wanted to pursue a career in science. He was not admitted into university at first for his background reasons. Later, after a year of working in horticulture industry, he succeeded and graduated in botany at the Faculty of Science. As a student in the 1960s, he travelled several times to Western Europe. After his studies, he joined the State Institute of Conservation and Nature Conservation. When the ecologically oriented Brontosaurus movement was established under the banner of the Socialist Youth Union (SSM) in 1974, Václav joined it and, together with other colleagues, organised summer camps for children. In the late 1980s he participated in meetings of the Circle of Independent Intellectuals and during the Velvet Revolution he was a member of the Civic Forum coordination centre. With actors and students, they toured Czechoslovakia to break the information blockade. He died on 25 August 2022.
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!
