“I was in the viewfinder and they invited me to Olomouc. They started massaging me. At least three or four times they invited me there, and two or three times they visited me in the hospital. I was tired and completely down. In my mind the following went on: 'Do you know how easy it is for us to stage a traffic accident in which you will be the culprit? You can just end up in jail and know how it will affect your family?´ Or: 'You have a son. He is six years old, but he wants to go to school one day. Do you think it will be possible with your profile? ‘I won't list everything here, but then they began winding me up about what would happen if I signed. I kept avoiding the answer and giving excuses that I had to change my mind and that it wasn't easy. I was already broken because I was afraid. I was already discussing a divorce with my wife. That if I can withstand it, they'll surely lock me up and I end up in jail, all trapped. I didn't want to bring the whole family into trouble. My wife sent me to hell she wouldn't divorce me for that. If the divorce, then for another reason. That I deserved it, but not because of politics. She was an intelligent woman. Then I talked to my friend and life teacher, Dr. Papica. He was a long-time member of the Department of Psychology, a distinctive personality, year 21, Kounic's dormitory, concentration camp, total deployment, communist punches, an extremely well-read and intelligent guy, but a tough guy from Wallachia. And he told me a sentence that stuck in my head: 'I didn't understand that you were a communist student because I had to be there, but well. But I tell you one thing. The dividing line is not between the Communists and the non-Communists, it is between decent people and whores, so choose yourself. So I stuck, and when they came back to Šternberk again, I said, 'You know what? I was thinking about it and in no way will I sign.”
“It was a period of disillusionment after the year 1968, when alcohol consumption was proven to increase. People were drinking terribly in their jobs. The action ten meant that everyone threw in a penny and the youngest ran for a bottle. Drinking was quite a norm. Completely dreadful on construction sites. In a group session, a 28-year-old man told me that they would come to the construction site on Monday, get together by twelve, and when the weather wasn't ideal, they would sit down and start drinking. And sometimes they kept drinking all week. The leader then had to show them fictitious performances to appear to have done something. By the way, when he got his first sick pay, he stopped the treatment because his sick pay, which was actually higher than my salary at that time, was much smaller than the earnings from the building. He said he wouldn't be there for the money. So it was such a distorted time.”
“Because I had a certain charisma and leadership needs, everywhere I came, I was gradually leading. Even at the gymmasium, where I was not a class chairman or something, but I was a kind of an informal leader, of course the teachers noticed. One more colleague asked me to join the party. Of course I was at Czech Youth Association then, it was impossible otherwise to be honest. I thought very much about it, I talked to my father about it. He told me a lot of things then. Somehow he concluded that I had to decide for myself. However, I made my decision on the basis of a very erroneous calculation, which, however, a person has at the age of 18 has a certain right. At that time there was really no other power except the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia that could move things. At the time, I thought that if people came in with a sensible view of things and maintained social justice, but at the same time removed the absolutely nonsensical aspects of the whole ideology, it could move somewhere. The events around me confirmed it. Not that it occurred to me, but there was such a rustling in the party. So when I joined the faculty, I had to register with the student party organization of the Communist Party of the Philosophical Faculty and the next year I became the vice-chairman.”
Vladimír Řehan was born on 28 January 1948 in Olomouc. At the age of eighteen, at a time of a certain political liberation, he joined the Communist Party and became part of its reform wing. As he himself says, he imagined under the influence of a certain youthful indiscretion that with other like-minded communists the system would change from within. But two years later, in 1968, the Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia and the occupation finally halted the revival process. Like many others, he joined the protesters and was expelled from the Communist Party during the normalization testing and threatened to be fired from the Faculty of Arts of the Palacký University in Olomouc, where he studied professional psychology. That became a part of his personal file. Fifteen years later, he was contacted by the state police, while working as a clinical psychologist in an alcoholic hospital, which was part of the Šternberk Psychiatric Hospital. He was forced to cooperation by numerous threats. As he was worried about the fate of his family, he almost succumbed to the pressure. But in the end he refused to sign in. After the fall of the Communist regime, he was awarded a post at the Department of Psychology at the Philosophical Faculty of the Palacký University in Olomouc, where he later held the post of Vice-Dean, two Dean and Vice-Rector UP Olomouc‘s electoral terms. In 2019 he lived in the village of Javorek in the Highlands.
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!
