David Piálek

* 1952

  • "When the grandfather came and we had Christmas dinner, we basically didn't know each other. And now there was a festive table, onion china, napkins, silver cutlery... And now this grandfather took the cutlery and suddenly turned red and started looking at us, especially the kids, the grown-ups, significantly. And we realized that he didn't actually know how to use cutlery. Because he'd been eating with a spoon for 14 years. Then he got over it, he got over it, but it was such a powerful moment."

  • "I remember it was the same thing with his release after serving his sentence, where we basically did a later Christmas: that we would wait for my grandfather to come home and do Christmas Eve. He was being released from Valdice. And now we had telegraphed about when he was likely to arrive, which train he should take to Prague and from there to Marianske Lazne. We went to meet him, because after fourteen years he would hardly find the address. And then we met him at the station. And he didn't come. We went to the next train, and he didn't come again. We took about six of these trains day and night, when we used to go from Třebízský Street to the station in Mariánky, which is across the city. When my grandfather finally arrived the next morning, he explained to us that the train from Jičín had come for him at about ten o'clock in the morning. He asked to leave the prison at nine o'clock in the morning so that he could catch the train. And they told him that he started his sentence at one o'clock after lunch, so they would let him go at one o'clock after lunch. They didn't let him out until 1:00. And of course he missed everything, so he had to take a different train somehow and he didn't arrive until a day later."

  • "I can tell you one of my first personal experiences with the communist persecution. I remember, I could have been about four years old, because neither I nor my brother, who was two years older than me, had gone to school yet, so I was four years old or younger when we were searched. My recollection of it is that my mother and I were sitting on the couch in the living room and everything was being run in front of us - out of the closets, on the floor, of course. And now right in front of us was this dresser and on top of it was a glass display case. And there was a man who had a leather coat, high boots, a hat on his head. He opened the bottom dresser, and there was laundry in there, and he threw it all out on the floor and then he was stepping all over it. And on top of it was a glass case, and we had Otto's dictionary. The man wanted to take out all the parts of the dictionary. There was peephole glass. And he didn't know how to get in. He tried to open the door with his fingers, and he couldn't. He looked back over his shoulder at us, and then he elbowed the glass until it all spilled out on the floor. Then he took out these Otto dictionaries, leafed through them and threw them on the floor. It didn't so much as flash in my mind that we had to clean up for a week afterwards and so on. But that he was a man who couldn't open a trap door. How is that possible? It's been in the back of my mind for years and I didn't understand it. How can such a thing be, how can it be?"

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Valeč v Čechách, 01.03.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 01:45:02
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Leopoldov, Mírov, Valdice, Jáchymov, Bytíz, Ruzyně. Everywhere we went to visit

David Piálek during filming
David Piálek during filming
zdroj: filming Post Bellum

David Piálek comes from a family whose members were at the birth of the Czechoslovak Republic and put their lives on the line for it. His great-grandfather, Emanuel Viktor Voska, worked for the US intelligence services during the First and Second World War and in 1918 arranged a meeting between Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and US President Woodrow Wilson, which was a prerequisite for the US to recognise Czechoslovakia as a state. Rudolf Bechyně‘s second great-grandfather was Minister of Education, Railways and Supply during the First Republic, and served in London as a member of the Czechoslovak Council of State during World War II. After 1948, when the Communists took over the government, many members of David Piálek‘s family were imprisoned for political reasons. He himself was born on 13 February 1952 in Chomutov, the son of Petrusha, née Bechyňová, and František Piálek from Stará Říše in the Třebíč region. He grew up in Klášterec nad Ohří, Kraslice and Mariánské Lázně. While attending primary school, he was often stigmatized as a „problem“ pupil for political reasons. Between 1967 and 1970 he trained as a carpenter in Domažlice. He successfully passed the entrance exams for secondary school, but was not accepted for political reasons. He worked as a stoker and professional driver, lived in Domažlice and in Zlín (then Gottwaldov). After 1989, he continued his family tradition and participated in the revival of the Czechoslovak Social Democracy, but after Miloš Zeman became the party‘s chairman, he perceived that its direction no longer corresponded to its original ideals and left the party. In the 1990s, his family restituted the farm and dairy building that his grandparents Zdeněk and Villa Bechyň built in Brody, West Bohemia. Now (2024) he lives not far from there in the village of Chyše.