“They put me into prison because I wrote a couple of controversial articles. In an article with the title ‘Different Views on the Censorship of the Press’, I wrote that Adolf Hitler had written in ‘Mein Kampf’ that it is necessary to limit the freedom of the press and Gustav Husak said exactly the same thing, even the word order was the same. Contrary to that, Rosa Luxemburg and all the others were against censorship, just those two, Hitler and Husak, supported it. So they accused me of besmirching constitutional authorities. I published these articles in regular daily newspapers. It appeared in the newspapers in 1968 so these articles are available. But there was more of the defamation, so at first I was sentenced conditionally and then they sentenced me to a year unconditionally and I got into prison. And thus I got the opportunity to study criminology.”
“They came to me and asked me if I wanted to become the director of the Plzeň branch of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Democracy. This was basically the contemporary Security and Information Service (BIS). In the beginning – when it came into existence – it was called the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Democracy. There were a lot of people there and you could say that I actually took over the StB in western Bohemia. I started by dismissing people had been fighting the so-called ‘internal enemy’. But I retained the people who had worked with eavesdropping techniques and things like that. Gradually, the office was growing smaller and smaller. By the time I went to retirement, I was interested in information science. Most people think that when someone has access to information, he knows the truth. But a piece of information may be true, false or misleading. That’s what I learned there. You never know if the information you have means something, whether it’s actually important or not, true or not. It’s only a piece of information, not the truth.”
Jan Thoma was born in Plzeň on January 14, 1935. After his graduation from secondary school, he took an apprenticeship for a machine fitter at the national works Škoda Plzeň and then completed extramural studies at the School of Industrial Engineering. He furthermore completed a course at the Military Aviation School and after seven years of active military service, which took him to the Líně military airport near Plzeň, he completed post-gradual studies of metrology. With this qualification, he was able to get a job in the Škoda nuclear-engineering works in Plzeň. In 1968, being the chairman of the ROH committee of the factory, he became actively involved in the revival process. He was also a delegate to the Congress of the metalworkers. For his activities, including the spreading of anti-party leaflets and literature, he was incarcerated for a year in 1970. His trial became the third major political trial in the period of the normalization. After having served his term, he worked in the construction sector in Plzeň as a concrete worker. Despite the fact that he remained under constant oversight by the StB and was frequently summoned for interrogations, he kept expanding his horizons in the fields of social sciences, history, political sciences, philosophy and sociology. In early January 1977, he signed the Charter 77 and after November 1989, he was appointed director of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Democracy responsible for the region of western Bohemia. He retired in 1996 and since then, he devoted himself to reading, writing and further studies. He remained greatly interested in social and political affairs until his death in July 2013.
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