"I spent the invasion at the beach, or rather on a rock. On the morning of the twenty-first of August, we took the car and drove to a teeny-tiny parking lot among the rocks, on a road that went along the coast. We were driving with a Czech flag on the carrier on the roof even at that time, because we had already slept in the car on the way. I noticed that the French were looking at us weirdly. I had a transistor and I was listening to Prague on shortwave. I still remember it as if it was yesterday. Now imagine that I turned on some station at about 10 a.m. and there they were saying, 'Soviet tanks advancing from Kladno to Prague.' I called my girlfriend and I said, 'Hey, look, there's a World War II play on here.' So we started listening, and we listened, and we listened, and then I said, 'That's impossible. There's something going on, something happened there.' We packed up, we left the beach and we went to our so-called home, which means to the family."
"There was some general talk and then there was one sentence. I smile about it to this day. It was, and I quote: ‘Politically rather negative.’ And another sentence: 'He participated in an extraordinary shift in honour of the 14th Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.' They made it mandatory for us to work the extra shift on Saturday, so not attending was impossible. When they wrote politically rather negative, I asked them to be more specific, because I hadn't expressed myself at Crystalex much. I didn't join any of the youth organizations that were new at the time, the Youth Union or whatever it was called."
"When he started asking some stupid questions, I was very careful about what I was going to answer. I'll give an example. He came regularly with a list of people who had applied for an exit permit. He said, 'What do you think?' I would look at the list and say, 'Yeah, good, good, good.' That's how I communicated with this person."
Oldřich Pleštil was born on January 5, 1946 in Liberec. His mother Marie worked in a kindergarten and his father Oldřich taught practical classes at the University of Mechanical Engineering and Textiles in Liberec. He went to primary school in Liberec and in 1964 graduated from a secondary school in Jablonec nad Nisou with a specialization in international trade. Between 1964 and 1973 he studied international trade at the University of Economics and Business in Prague. During his studies he became a candidate of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and joined the Union of University Students of Bohemia and Moravia. In 1968, he considered emigrating to Switzerland, but eventually decided to stay. During the period of normalization he was expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia for alleged passivity. He then worked as an auxiliary worker at Pozemní stavby, but was able to continue his studies at the university. After finishing his studies, he entered the basic military service in Sokolov in 1973. He served in an artillery regiment and after finishing his military service he got a job as a dispatcher at Crystalex in Nový Bor. He then moved to the Industrial Automation Plant in the same town, where he later became a sales deputy. During this time, he was recruited by the State Security to cooperate with them and became an agent under the code name Jarda. In 1992, he switched companies again and started working for the German company Varta, where he later became the executive director. He retired in 2012. In 2023 he was living in Česká Lípa.
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!
