Dalibor Fencl

* 1966

  • "We were just sitting there, then the cops were there with the plexiglass shields, and they were pushing us to back off... we were just sitting there at first, then we got up, then they pushed us back, I only found out in retrospect that it was closed on the other side, I didn't know that those people couldn't back off at the theatre. But I didn't even want to back up, I didn't want to give in to the pressure, but at the same time I was kind of subtly there... so suddenly I was at the shields, that I was doing like backing up on the challenges, but I wasn't backing up too much. And all of a sudden I felt the shields open up and I got sucked in between them like that. Because they understood that somebody was holding it up somehow and it was probably me, so I got sucked in like that and I was behind these police cordons. I was sucked in at the same time as Margot Fialkova, the daughter of Dana Nemcova, who was then ambassador to Poland, and I know that she was still... she suddenly called out to me what my name was, because we were there with this Katya Pajerova, who didn't even address me by my first name, but as Borka, so she didn't know either, so she called out to me what my name was, and by my last name, that she was going to have me announced on Voice of America that I was arrested then, too, when she was being taken away like that, next to me, or a little bit away from me. So I shouted it at her, although I could tell that she wasn't much help, so I shouted it at her, and then there was a shower of punches, besides the ones I had already received, there was a second shower of various punches with a baton, so I looked to see if they were beating her too, and I must say that I was pleased to see that at least as a woman she wasn't being beaten..."

  • "Then somehow the borders opened up and we had enough money in that school, right, because people would bring us money and we had a box of money in there. That's just the way it was, a box of money, and anybody who needed to get something done, they'd go in there like that and get the money and just go pay for it. So I know we took some money like that, we got in a Goliath and we went to Vienna to buy new printer heads for the printers that had gone, they couldn't stand that kind of life. Which was funny, because it was the first time I'd ever been to Vienna in my life, in the West, I didn't know anybody there, but I had the slogan Ivan Medek, Voice of America, Vienna, fixed in my head. So when we bought the heads, I went into a phone booth and I found Ivan Medek in the phone book, we found the address, somehow we arrived at the address and we rang the doorbell and said that we were the students on strike and that we would like to talk to him because we didn't know anyone else in Vienna other than Medek, because the slogan Ivan Medek, Voice of America, Vienna was very strong in our heads. They welcomed us enthusiastically, they were very nice, they gave us tea, cakes, so we sat there for two hours, talking with him, he asked questions, because we came from the centre of the action..."

  • "Then we confiscated the keys to the Xerox machine. That was strategic, because the Xerox was guarded, locked, no one was allowed to go near it. Then finally... there was one, right, in the whole faculty. Then we confiscated it. Before that, we'd scrounge up some cyclostyles, learn how to use it, print stuff on it. In the beginning they employed these needle printers, you probably don't know what a needle printer is anymore. That's every letter, the needles were there that printed those letters that they punched through some of that black tape, like a typewriter, onto that paper and it was infinitely slow and there were people who had their own printers by then. We requisitioned all the school ones, they just went, they printed leaflets, even some of them were private, those people sacrificed their printers and printed it on them too. They had that ZX Spectrum at home, that printer, which was incredibly valuable. And also, those printers gradually all broke down, they weren't built to print that way, to print 24 hours a day."

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    Praha, 19.07.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 01:45:18
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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It was clear that I was going to be arrested

Dalibor Fencl in 1995
Dalibor Fencl in 1995
photo: Archive of the witness

Dalibor Fencl was born on 2nd October 1966 in Prague Podolí. His parents were university professors at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University. Dalibor Fencl gradually became acquainted with the underground and sympathized with anti-regime views. In the Scouts they listened to Karel Kryl, at grammar school he had a classmate from a dissident family who lent him banned books and he began to attend the first demonstrations. His opposition to the regime grew in college, he listened to the regime’s unpopular big beat, got into samizdat, attended housing seminars and continued to participate in demonstrations. In 1989, he became a representative of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University, thanks to which he took part in the meetings in the Disk, and thus became one of the student leaders of the Velvet Revolution. He actively participated in demonstrations and subsequent negotiations, and spoke in favour of the election of Václav Havel. In December 1989, he took a humanitarian aid train to Romania. However, he soon left politics, graduated from FAMU and began working as a cameraman. He and his wife raised two children. In 2022 he lived in Prague.