Jindřich Vaňák

* 1937

  • "I remember I was on the Dolní Vltavice, which ended with a bridge over the Vltava River, and that bridge was already in a zone where no one could walk. The only thing that was allowed there were the border guards who drove their cars there to cut and bring the hay back. I remember that we, when we went to this first zone, we had to have what were called passes. So when I went through Kájov and on to Dolní Vltavice we walked and there we were put up in a pub. We had mattresses in the hall and we slept on those mattresses. There was also a school, a fifth grade school, right next to the church, nowadays it's all flooded, but they said then, before they started filling it up, the church would stay. So I went there and the advantage of my being there was that I earned two thousand every month during that one and two month vacation, that was big money for me. I used it to pay for my food while I was studying, because my accommodation was free, so that helped me a lot.

  • "There was a train coming out of Pečky and there was a meadow around it, so they had the opportunity to shoot from both sides, so they suddenly appeared there and started shooting at the train. I personally saw the train coming out of the station, and now two of these fighters appeared there, and one of them flew at it and fired a rocket. The driver stopped and the cars, we called them hytlaks, they were cars that had a compartment and there was a step and you went straight out, so those people could go straight out of the compartment. All the people escaped and they came back and they shot through the boiler and they flew away."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    České Budějovice, 24.11.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:00:14
  • 2

    České Budějovice, 22.03.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 02:48:57
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

We cheated on each other and everyone kept their mouths shut

ID card photo, 1958
ID card photo, 1958
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Jindřich Vaňák was born on 11 December 1937 in Pilsen. His father Jindřich Vaňák was a miller and the family often moved to the mills where he worked. His mother was a housewife. He lived through the war and remembers, for example, the attacks of the figter pilots. In 1950 the family moved to Soběslav and in 1953 they settled permanently in Jindřichův Hradec, where father found work in another mill. The witness was trained as an electrical engineer and went on to study at secondary technical school. At the same time, he had to work to afford his studies. He also worked in the Šumava border region, where people were only allowed to enter with a pass. From 1956 to 1958 he was in the army, half a year of which was spent at the school of operators in Poprad, Slovakia. After his military service, in 1958, he started working in heavy operation at Electric Assembly Plants in the Klement Gottwald New Steelworks in Vítkovice, then he was transferred to Poldi Kladno, and then from 1960 to 1983 he spent his working years in Kovosvit in Sezimovo Ústí. He worked on prototypes, he and his team filed several patents, at the beginning they managed to keep up with the world, but gradually they started to fall behind. Jindřich Vaňák signed the 2000 Words declaration, he was fired from the party, his family was in trouble. In 1983 he started working at the Plant for the Production of Air Handling Equipment) in Milevsko. Here he started to go on foreign business trips, because his professional erudition was irreplaceable, besides Germany he was also in Novosibirsk, for example. In 1987 he moved to Waterworks, where he also experienced the revolution in 1989. From 1993 he taught at the Kovosvit apprenticeship, retiring in 1997. He has a wife and two daughters. In 2024 he was living in Sezimovo Ústí.