Jan Šinogl

“After certain period of time we were always being summoned to the StB with the notice that they wanted to talk to us, but to each of us separately, not together. When we were going there in the early 1980s, they felt self-assured. They threatened us, and they forced us to request emigration passports. My wife wanted to leave the country, but I didn’t feel like it. They kept suggesting to us that if we did not stop our activity, then things would become bad for us. On top of that, somebody attempted to hijack a crop duster airplane here: there were two families from Brodek u Prostěova, and we got involved in it so much that the whole village thought that I had piloted the airplane, but we didn’t know those people at all. I only heard when they were starting the engine of the airplane and it flew for a short time and then there was a crash and it was down on the ground. There were two families - four adults and four children. I went to them when the plane crashed and I told them that I would do something for them if they needed. And one of the women asked me to send a message to her grandparents in Brodek. Before the StB and the police arrived, she wrote their address for me on a piece of paper. My wife and I then went to Brodek and we found them and they immediately went to Znojmo to pick up those four children, and so at least they did not have to be sent to some children’s home. And as I said a while ago, during those interrogations I already started feeling that the tension was diminishing. Those ‘besprechung’ - Milan Uhde was the one who made up this expression - when we were being summoned to interrogation by the StB, and then suddenly, after Gorbachev started his perestroika, when we came to the interrogation, the StB man offered me a cup of coffee. I refused, not because I would be afraid that it would be poisoned, but because I was quite taken aback by it. At first it didn’t occur to me, but when I thought about it, I thought: ‘Well, something is happening, they are not so sure anymore.’ And gradually it was loosening more and more, and I was even able to apply to work privately under the local administration committee. All of a sudden they also stopped jamming the Radio Free Europe so fiercely, and from time to time, something would appear in the newspapers as well.”

“When we voted for the first time in this village which was narrow-minded and full of communists, they thought that we would not come to vote [in 1975] at all. We came, they gave us the ballot paper, which they placed inside the envelope for us straight away, and they thought that we would go to insert it in the ballot box directly, as it was commonly done, since people were not even going inside the voting booth. But we took the ballot papers and we went straight behind the voting booth. They were shocked that there was somebody who wanted to vote in the manner people were supposed to vote. And this was then dragging behind us. Actually, the year 1968 and my whole story culminated in this. Our mixed family and so on. We were confronted with many interesting things a number of times. For instance, one naïve aunt of ours from Vienna told us: ‘If you cannot arrive here, then at least come to the border gate and we will come there, too, and we will talk over the border fence.’ We had to explain to her, that we would not even be able to get to the border gate, because there was a five-kilometre zone where they would shoot us if we got in there, and that they would not let us get in there at all. On this example you can see the depravity of the system, that it’s completely idiotic.”