Jiří Drahoňovský

* 1954

  • "At the district congress of the Communist Party, the district secretary Jaroslav Brüknar pondered that under the guise of the SSM Dolní Kalná there was a bunch of adventurers who were spreading anti-Party sentiment among the young people and inciting the youth against friendship with the Soviet Union. This was then also printed in Krkonošská Pravda. And Joska Bajer and Jirka Černý said that we must react, because if we don't react, we admit that we are guilty. We wrote a letter demanding an apology, that our organisation had been attacked and that our name had been tarnished. We listed how many hours of work we had done, etc. But the response was that everyone on the SSM committee was invited to SSM headquarters. Except for me. There again Brüknar shouted at them to realise who this Bajer was, who was employed by the Dutch embassy, the last part of the chain of anti-socialist sentiment from abroad."

  • "When there was a petition called 'A Few Sentences', I got it in my hand with signature sheets so that I could also collect signatures. So I collected, collected, collected, and when I got to fifty or sixty signatures, suddenly the State Security showed up at my house and confiscated the lists with signatures. Well, it was caused by my dumbness. They wanted my ID, I reached into my backpack, where the sheets were, and they took the backpack. The people who signed there also had problems at work. But nobody was fired. I got a call from the operations department in Hradec Kralove that I was to be fired immediately. But the depot management in Trutnov squashed it and threw it in the trash, even though they were communists. For that I have to thank them to this day for standing up for me."

  • "[The Cermans] were a farmers' family that did very well after 1945. They had the first thresher and used new fertilisers. In the early 1950s there was a lot of pressure to join the JZD and they resisted. The communists gave them terrible conditions for grain deliveries that could not be met, and there was probably a lot of talk about it at home. Their son, Vladimir Cerman, when there was a communist meeting where they again persuaded the farmers to join the JZD, shot out the light bulb in that room through the window. At first it was quiet, but then the word got around and at a party he shouted that he had done it. The StB started looking for him, then he hid at the Ježek familyi in Ždírnice. The trial then ended with Vladimir receiving the death penalty by hanging, his father about six years, and the Ježeks twenty years in hard labour. After the sixtieth year, Ježek was rehabilitated, but his health was already fragile."

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    Vrchlabí, 28.02.2023

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    duration: 02:10:05
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Under the guise of the SSM (Czechoslovak Socialist Youth Union), a bunch of adventurers are stirring up the young against the Soviet Union

Jiří Drahoňovský (2nd from right) with friends in the Luzicke Mountains, 1980s.
Jiří Drahoňovský (2nd from right) with friends in the Luzicke Mountains, 1980s.
photo: Archiv Jiřího Drahoňovského

Jiří Drahoňovský was born into a teachers’ family on 7 October 1954 in Jilemnice and lived his whole life in the village of Dolní Kalná. His entrepreneurial maternal grandfather had his cement factory and several patents nationalised by the communists. Grandfather had to pay rent in his own house for the rest of his life. In the 1950s, Vladimír Cerman, who was persecuted by the regime, briefly hid at his mother’s cousin Stanislav Ježek’s house. After his capture, the Communists sentenced the eighteen-year-old to death in a public trial and Stanislav Ježek to twenty years in prison. Later, when Jiří Drahoňovský’s father stood up for the convicted Cerman’s sister, he had to leave his teacher’s post in Čistá for a small class in Dolní Kalná. Jiří Drahoňovský graduated from high school in Česká Třebová and became a train driver. From the 1970s he co-organised concerts of the Prague underground and Jiří Černý’s anti-discotheque in Dolní Kalná and the surrounding villages. After the intervention of the State Security and the ban on concerts, he started to organise various thematic tourist marches and other cultural events. The most famous of these, the night climb to Sněžka, will celebrate its 47th anniversary in 2023. In the spring of 1989, he began collecting signatures for the manifesto Several Sentences. Although the StB confiscated the signature sheets and threatened him with dismissal from his job, he started collecting signatures again. After the Velvet Revolution, he founded the Civic Forum with friends in the village. He and his wife raised two children, and by 2023 they were living in Dolní Kalná, and Jiří Drahoňovský was the long-time mayor of the local Sokol.