Jaroslav Suk

* 1948

  • "We were in Kibbutz north of Haifa and we found out when we were at Lake Kineret or the Sea of Galilee, I still remember hearing in Hebrew, 'Ha tankim sovjetim be ha Chechoslovakia.' So we asked what was going on and our guide told us and it was a shock, of course. Then they took pictures of us all sitting around listening to Hebrew, which we didn't understand, on the radio."

  • "So if Moscow was a culture shock for me, Siberia was a complete muddle, you really saw poverty there. The villages that were along the river, in the taiga, there were such dwarf pigs, primitive living, no hygiene, there was one shop in the village where they sold vodka and another shop where they bought bottles, there was no electricity, when they came to show a film they had to start a generator that was whirring all the time, right. They just brought in flour sometimes, the most basic things like that, on a boat that came up the Lena every week. And then there were these, there's military bases up north, so they used to take things up there on the boat, too. I was also in closed cities, because I was a young boy and nobody knew I was a foreigner, so I was in Angarsk and Omsk, you didn't know there was radioactivity after the accident."

  • "And of course I only came of age in Moscow, when I saw with my own eyes that they were lying to us. Everything that I encountered there, the stench, the crowding, the disrespect for people, it was all a lie. It was completely different there. Suddenly I felt that the Czech culture or the Western culture is something completely different from what they present to us as a model. Russian society was scattered, a big difference between rich and poor. The hatred of Jews, things like that, things that you just didn't like, bad taste, a lot of things that you were suddenly confronted with, and I was, I don't know, thirteen, fourteen years old, so it hits you very deeply and I just started looking for something else."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 07.04.2022

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The Prague Spring was the time when history began to move

Jaroslav Suk 1979, photo by Jan Bednář
Jaroslav Suk 1979, photo by Jan Bednář
zdroj: Competition

Jaroslav Suk was born on 27 December 1948 in Louny into a family of left-wing journalists. His father, Jindřich Suk, worked at the Ministry of the Interior, and then, like his mother, Věra, née Černá, at the Czechoslovak Press Agency (ČTK). In 1963, the family left for a working stay in Moscow. There, their apartment became a meeting place for Soviet artists and intellectuals. Jaroslav Suk travelled around the Soviet Union and wrote articles on cosmonautics. He entered the journalism faculty in Moscow, but returned to Prague in the autumn of 1967 and transferred to the Faculty of Arts of Charles University (FF UK). He became involved in student activities during the Prague Spring. The invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 found him with a student delegation in Israel. On his return he organised a student strike and in December 1968 co-founded the unofficial left-wing Revolutionary Youth Movement (HRM). In 1970 he was arrested with other HRM members and sentenced to two years in prison, from which he was released in November 1971. He and his wife Dagmar founded the publishing house of samizdat and exile literature Krtek and Datel in 1974 and collaborated with Charter 77. In 1981 he was forced to leave the republic by pressure from State Security as part of the Asanace action. They continued to support the activities of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted and the importation of printed materials into the Czechoslovak Republic. In 2023 Jaroslav Suk was living in Uppsala, Sweden.