Jan Svoboda

* 1945

  • "That was a time of shortage. People today say how good it was and what not. It's not true. Everything was scarce, everything was in short supply. The so-called 'planned economy' ruled, and the way they envisaged it, the communists and the planners just couldn't make it work. Let me give you an example. When I worked in the warehouse, all of a sudden we ran out of tires. The car stopped running. We had tires dumped behind the shop, and we went there and browsed the tires that had been there for years. We found one that was fine, but a tree was growing through it, meaning the tire had been there for maybe ten years. We cut down the tree, took the tire and put it on the car. People today complain they have worn tires... We used worn-through tires and put pads in them to keep the inner tubes from peeking out. Nobody can imagine what it was like. There was a garage here when I worked as a supply clerk. Exhaust pipes were in short supply, so they welded old pipes on with sheet metal bands. The hoses that went from the engine to the radiator would burst. They lasted about 1,500 kilometres. We would tape them up."

  • "We were on a training exercise in 1968. I suffered a knee injury. So before the Russians came in, I was in hospital in Olomouc, and then I was transferred to Jihlava. When the 'friends', the Warsaw Pact troops, came in, I was already in the infirmary in Jihlava. Our regiment drove tanks from the training area in Libavá to Jihlava. The guys told me how they met them. Right on the way out, they met the Poles. Going tanks against tanks, head on, they were waiting to see what happens. Suddenly it was like ants running away from the tanks. The Poles left their tanks and ours drove past them. The commander shouted, they stopped and looked at their weapons. The commander shouted and they went on. I guess the Polish army didn't feel like fighting."

  • "When I became an apprentice, I had nothing to do in my free time, so I started taking music lessons on the clarinet. When I came to the high school in 1963, I was looking for a place to play the clarinet, a dance orchestra. I was looking into opportunities, and suddenly a boy, Olda Pivnička, came to me and said that he had been given the task as an official to start an orchestra, a big band in Nová Huť. The authorities wanted it to be under control, that's why they did this with factory clubs. He asked me if I wanted to play the saxophone. Well, why not; I did. Since I didn't play the saxophone, they lent me one from the local music school. I went to rehearsals, they had a guitar player who wasn't very good. I said I could learn it in a fortnight. So I was playing the guitar in 14 days. Those were the best years of my life. Hard music. Chuck Berry, Richards, Bill Haley, Presley, Beatles, Rolling Stones. This kind of stuff, hard rock. We were good at learning, we didn't have to learn much. And those were the best years I ever had."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Telč, 28.11.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:26:12
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Class origin was decisive, we became hostages of the regime

Jan Svoboda with grandmother Božena, 1945
Jan Svoboda with grandmother Božena, 1945
zdroj: Witness's archive

Jan Svoboda was born in Telč on 26 January 1945. He came from a businessman‘s family that owned the Svoboda confectionery, which the communists nationalised in 1948. Svoboda‘s uncle left the country at the time. Jan Svoboda finished primary school in Telč and entered apprenticeship as a truck mechanic at the age of fifteen. Because of his class background, he had no chance to study at a ‚better‘ high school. Later on, thanks to the regime ‚thaw‘, he completed a high school of transport technology. He joined the army in the autumn of 1967 and witnessed the Warsaw Pact troop invasion in the private rank. His military service extended until Christmas 1969 due to the invasion. In the wake of August 1968, Svoboda‘s brother emigrated to Canada. Following his military service, Jan Svoboda began working as an auto mechanic and later as a traffic dispatcher. He married in 1972 and brought up four children with his wife Zdeňka. In the 1970s, he was demoted from his traffic dispatcher position to work as a supply clerk because of relatives being abroad. Still, he was offered cooperation with the StB several times, which he never accepted. He was listed as a person under surveillance. Following the revolution, he started a business selling car parts and the firm started repairing cars later on. The company continues to operate, and in 2010 he handed it over to his sons. Jan Svoboda was living in Telč in November 2023.