"The castle was blocked by cars, and now the police cars were driving and pushing the crowd in front of them. When it was in this development, it was... the cars were driving; the crowd was backing up, before they dispersed the crowd and directed them back to Strahov. He was already there – we only found out later of course – some sort of ambush squad, some sort of ambush commando was assigned. And that was happening... they were guys our age, no, it was some kind of police school and I don't know what, and they were like in the form of an exercise... and they were already waiting there. That is when you realized the monstrosity of the regime, it was as dark as a sack, you couldn't see anything at all. And, they drove their cars into the crowd. The tires stank, people shouted, screamed. There it went for life! As it was already out of the public eye, there they raged, so one realized fully what kind of monsters they were."
"The slogan 'We want light', which the ruling party interpreted ideologically, was not like that at all. When we each turned on a lamp in the evening so that we could study, the undersized electrical network simply went out. This means that on Sunday, at eight o'clock in the evening, the lights went out and that was it. Well, of course, we complained, but it did not lead to anything. Until one fine day, windows, doors, banging, whatever was at hand started to open, and suddenly the people started to get drunk. If you saw it in Strahov - there were such large boarding areas. So on that area suddenly there were ten people, suddenly there were twenty, suddenly there were a thousand and there was a problem. And, what else - the crowd, the crowd was completely disorganized rushed towards Prague, down towards Dlabačov and there is the Prague Castle on the road. It was not organized at all; it was a totally spontaneous event."
"The very next day, the engineering team was called in, they stretched the cables there, they buried them in such... they made such boxes so that - high voltage, distribution lines were not on the surface of the ground. It started to be done there immediately the next day. So it could have been solved a long time ago before. Then it happened... even some politicians held back the student community. It culminated in the fact that the police were forbidden access to Strahov - they had to wear numbers. That was after the events in Strahov. If there was a crime, something like that... but the solution to ordinary matters such as misdemeanors - that's how the student police was established at Strahov."
Jaroslav Pohan was born on March 10, 1945 in the village of Moraveč in Vysočín. He remembers his childhood as a difficult, yet relatively idyllic time. He grew up in a small village, somewhat hidden from the big events of the post-February events. He went to secondary technical college in České Budějovice and then to Prague to CTU. Here in 1967, as a student, he became a direct witness of the so-called Strahov events. Relatively prosaic reasons in the form of an inadequate electrical network, which made it impossible for students to study properly, turned into an ideological event, one of the detonators that stimulated the revival process in society in the 1960s and led to the Prague Spring. Jaroslav Pohan also tried to emigrate, but gave up his attempt. He did not want to expose the family to persecution. In 1971, after the war, he joined Metrostav, where they also felt „just so“ protected from communist pressure, because the construction of the subway was crucial for the communist party and they therefore needed experts. Nevertheless, he came under the crosshairs of the State Security (StB), from which he tried to escape by going to southern Bohemia to build Temelín. He experienced the coup in 1989 in Iraq and returned, as he says, to a completely different country. In 2022 he lived in České Budějovice.
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!
