"Civic Forum was created in a flat above the theatre. Jarmila Stibicová organized it. Olda Bašta was there, and Franta Vít, who was a member of the Communist Party at that time. He was the director of the Pardubice Gallery, a young man of my age, who immediately joined it. I joined too. There were, I think, two or three young girls from the economics school who came in as note-takers, among them - I remember the name - was Simona Škreptáčová, a student at the time, who helped transcribe the things that came in immediately. The first requests from Prague were already coming in. And that was the beginning of the Civic Forum in Pardubice."
"It was done naturally. Not systematically, with me going somewhere, picking something up and delivering it. Quite on the contrary. Once I copied an essay by Petr Pithart. I was working in Eram Company in Hradec Králové. I had a German typewriter called Robotron, which had a memory page, so it was very easy for me to transcribe one page and then make ten or fifteen copies. Actually, the machine printed that one page. So like this, I made 16 copies of Petr Pithart's essay and I gave it to Petr Kabeš in a hotel. We had many coffees with rum together. He gave me some money for the work, and I returned to Pardubice."
"The Charter declaration, January 1977, and I immediately went to Prague. I went to see Petr Kabeš as one of the signatories, because it was on Free Europe Radio or it was known." - "So you found out about it from Free Europe Radio?" - "Yes, and from my friends in the Old Town. I had no idea anything was going to happen, at all. So I went to Prague and it was sometime in the spring, I think it wasn't right in January. It was sometime in the spring when I went to see Petr. I asked him to bring the Charter, saying that I would sign it. Petr asked me how I was doing with the school. And I said I was in some kind of appeal to the Department of Education at the time and he said, 'If it doesn't work out, what are you going to do next?' I said, 'I'm going to appeal to the President's office,' and he said, 'Well, don't sign the Charter now, that's nonsense. If you sign it, you won't be able to appeal. Take the Charter to Pardubice, there are some people to sign it.' So I left with the Charter, and I went around my friends to see if they wanted to sign it, but none of them would sign it. So then when Petr came to Pardubice, I think sometime in May, and we met, he was quite disappointed that I couldn't get anyone to sign. And he left me alone because he knew I was in the appeal process."
"When I was reading through the files, I went out into the hallway where it was allowed to smoke, and there was a man standing there. And it was obvious that he wasn't going to leave before me, because he had a lot more to read. We were standing at the window smoking a cigarette and I said, 'Don't you think it is sometimes ridiculous?' And he looked at me and said, 'Well, you know, sometimes it really is.' And I thought it was quite ridiculous when I read it, because some of the passages had no importance. It was just statements of the people around us, statements of no relevance. Except one. And that was the one by Horáček. That's when I realized Jim was a snitch. I asked him back then - it was through Jirka Červenka and through Jim that it was possible to meet people from Ústí nad Labem or Teplice or Ostrava, from other places. I told him that I would love to start a real literary magazine, and I said, 'But a literary magazine, Jim! I don't want to cause any problems, it's going to be...' - it wasn't called samizdat at that time - '...it's just going to be my magazine. But I need you to get me in touch with people who would help me put it together.' And he told about this conversation to the Secret Police, and he added one thing: 'But knowing Mr. Šmíd, he won't avoid the politics, it's obviously made to attack the regime.'"
"I feel sorry for the talent and I feel sorry for the man because he actually devalued a lot of things that he did that were really great. I told you I still love some of his tunes and his songs to this day, but I can't quite enjoy them the way I did in that Old Town. Or, for example, when we went to Drozdice, which is a village just outside of Pardubice. This is one of the memorable experiences for me. When a group of about twelve of us were on the last bus to Pardubice and Jim started his accordion concert on that bus. The bus driver decided he wasn't going to stop anywhere, that he wasn't going to take anyone else, and he took a night ride with us around Pardubice in a regular bus, so he actually risked to be fired. But it was a tremendous experience, and that's how I shared Jim's performance. So I rather felt sorry for him afterwards, not that I was angry with him. Yes, angry at first, but not afterwards. I was sorry that a talent like that and a man like that would turn into such a snitch."
"I was bringing a portrait of President Václav Havel, that we made in 1996 or 97, to Prague for People in Need. For the organization that bought it from us - from my publishing house. Suddenly Jimy Čert Horáček was coming out of the Czech Television Building in Kavčí Hory, which was opposite to the People in Need seat. He came back from America. He called out to me because he saw me, so we ran up those stairs, we hugged, we held each other, I was happy to see him again. And a fortnight later I went to the Salesian to see my file and there I found out about him... Had it been 14 days before, I don't know... I'm sure I wouldn't hit him, but I think in all fairness I would have turned my back on him and walked away. But I didn't know it when we met, I found out rather late about it."
"The State Secret Police in Pardubice worked with other people from my circle. Not that they were people who denounced, but for example, my friend Zdeněk Stehno had a classmate who worked for the Secret Police, and he communicated with them in some way... The Secret Police bothered other people, me not so much. It's true that I later learned from the files that... Jakub was already born at that time, and I had already left the university. I was working as a regular worker, and they searched our home when we weren't there. Someone took a time-lapse of our daily routine. They took advantage of our absence, broke into our flat but found nothing because I kept everything at the cottage or at friends' houses... I just knew from the moment I got kicked out of uni that it wasn't safe to keep stuff like for example a stack of Testimonies at home… I actually felt free after they'd expelled me from uni, I stopped being so scared."
"The focus of our conversations at parties or places where we met was much more poetry, much more literature, much more music than politics. But when we got to the politics, we defined it very clearly: we didn't want to have anything to do with the regime, as long as they wouldn't drag us into anything. The literary part actually led naturally to the fact that we decided to start a magazine - a literary magazine, we called it Bedna. We were five key writers, who would contribute to each issue, and then we would invite our friends or people who were like-minded to contribute, and we started publishing that. One of us was always in charge of one issue. The person in charge was also responsible for some simple graphic design. There was no censorship of any of the text, everything was published the way the authors wrote it. We printed ten or twelve copies of each issue. Five were taken by us as authors and the rest were distributed to friends. It didn't have a big audience. What was left of Bedna is kept by Mr. Gruntorád in his archives. Of course, the magazine attracted attention of the State Secret Police immediately. That was obvious, because there were people in the Old Town who cooperated with them. The most famous one is probably Jimy Čert Horáček, musician and accordionist. But it wasn't just him, there were other people too."
"We had a great professor, Ms. Janašová, who was a Communist Party member. She encouraged us in the summer of '68 to join the Socialist Youth Union and the Communist Party, and she also encouraged us to think about running for the Party. And then August came, we started school in September and she came to the psychology class that she was teaching and she said, 'Kids, what happened is so shocking to me that not only you should think twice about joining the Socialist Youth Union, but there's no way I want to hear from anyone that they want to join the Communist Party,' and she started to shape us that way. For example, she was the one who explained to me in the third year of studies that journalists would be the first collaborators in the normalization era. She, being an active communist, who cut it off immediately after August, knew very well, of course, what would happen."
"The hotel bought a table at which the President Kubíček [Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira] signed the decree that changed the capital of Brazil – from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília. And because the hotel wanted to honour Václav Havel, they organized the press conference with Czech journalists in the lounge with this table. The table was in the shape of a rectangle, a big rectangle, and Václav Havel sat in the middle of that big rectangle. He was not a loud speaker, so he wanted to sit in the middle of the journalists so that he could communicate with them naturally and without any problems. And I was the very last one to enter the lounge and all the seats were taken except one. It was the chair at the front, with the flags behind it. So I sat down there. There was a very beautiful leather writing set in front of me and the press conference started. Mr. Špaček started speaking. And the reporters started asking questions and the waiter came in and he came up to me with a tray that had different kinds of drinks on it and asked me what I wanted. And Mr. Špaček said, and I quote, 'Holy shit! Why ain't he serving the president first?!' And Jan Macháček, who was sitting to my right, said, 'But he's the president now because he's sitting in Václav Havel's seat.' The waiter served me thinking I was the president... He's the only Brazilian who thought I was the Czech president. And it amused Václav Havel immensely."
Pavel Šmíd was born on 25 January 1952 in Pardubice into the family of Josef Šmíd and Alena née Králová. He had two younger brothers, Vojtěch and Richard, who emigrated to the West in the 1980s. After studying at the Secondary general education school in Pardubice, he wanted to study at Charles University, but was not allowed to do so. A year later, he succeeded in the admission procedure to the Faculty of Education in Hradec Králové. He studied the field of education with a focus on physical education for four years, but just before the state examinations, he was expelled for political reasons. From the end of the 1960s he lived in the Old Town in Pardubice, where a community of creative personalities, who were often disliked by the regime, gathered. Pavel Šmíd worked as a songwriter and he was a member of a rock band Adaptace in the Pardubice for two years. Most of his work was devoted to writing, his short stories were published in the samizdat magazines Obsah and Listy. Together with few friends, he founded the literary samizdat magazine Bedna in Pardubice, which was published between 1975 and 1978. He was in contact with people from the dissent, for example he worked with the poet Petr Kabeš. He supported, distributed and signed many political civic initiatives, such as Charter 77, Civil Freedom Movement, Democratic Initiative and the statement „Several Sentences“. He was often interrogated by the political police for his activities, and the State Secret Police kept three extensive files on him as one of his close friends - František Horáček, known as the singer-songwriter Jim Čert, was a very active Secret Police agent. In the mid-1970s, Pavel married Jana Chudobová, with whom he raised a son Jakub. After 17 November 1989, he participated in demonstrations and political negotiations, and was at the birth of the Civic Forum in Pardubice. Before the first free elections in June 1990, he was the manager of the Civic Forum in Pardubice. He then worked as a journalist and photographer, especially for the periodicals Aféra and Regional, which he co-founded. Between 1994 and 2010 he edited the official magazine of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called Welcome to the Heart of Europe. He divorced in 1999 and moved in with his partner Monika Harbichová. He continued with his own literary activities and published also other writers, especially in the long-term book project 7edmička. Pavel Šmíd died in March 2021.
From left: Pavel Šmíd, Jana Šmídová, Jakub Šmíd, Pavel Panoch, Tereza Chudobová, Bětka Procházková, Věra Procházková, Josef Procházka, Heřmanův Městec 1983
From left: Pavel Šmíd, Jana Šmídová, Jakub Šmíd, Pavel Panoch, Tereza Chudobová, Bětka Procházková, Věra Procházková, Josef Procházka, Heřmanův Městec 1983
Václav Havel's press conference at the hotel, on the far left Ladislav Špaček, at the head of the table Pavel Šmíd, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, September 1996
Václav Havel's press conference at the hotel, on the far left Ladislav Špaček, at the head of the table Pavel Šmíd, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, September 1996
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!
