Pavel Fiala

* 1956

  • "It was interesting that it wasn't until sometime in '83 that they became interested in me. So they were asking all sorts of questions and I thought, well, I guess the best strategy is to try to say as little as possible and make an ass of myself if possible. Like they said, 'You know, these are the people who are hurting this republic,' I was like, 'Really? I didn't notice that.' I was like... It was a decent interrogation, they didn't threaten me, they didn't beat me."

  • "I know that the people of Řepčice were being watched, did you feel that in any way?" - "Of course I felt it, because Charlie Soukup was getting out of jail on such a nice date, May Day in the year eighty-one, and I, because I was working at the TV station and had irregular working hours, came to Řepčice on Wednesday. That May Day, it was Friday. So, of course, Maruška [Soukupová] asked me if we could go together to get Charlie on that Friday. I said, yeah, of course. And then on Thursday morning we would go shopping, because of course a lot of people were expected to come to Řepčice to greet Charlie and celebrate his freedom with him. So we went to Litoměřice to do some shopping, and we didn't get back." - "What did that mean?" - "Řepčice were just surrounded by cops."

  • "What was happening there was that often during the day it was like working, because they were old buildings, there was always something that needed to be repaired or... I had the vehicle, so maybe it was [necessary] to go somewhere to get some materials or something. So there was all sorts of repairs, and then in the evening we'd sit down, right, buy some beer, somebody would play guitar, or we'd just talk. It was just normal, it wasn't anything... not that we were there to do anything."

  • "Well, I took it hard. My uncle made his departure smart by not telling anyone, and he gave my dad the keys to his apartment. Uncle lived in Ústí nad Labem. So we made several trips to that Usti, and we could take, just whatever we needed, whatever we could use, we could move out before, like, the apartment was somehow officially sealed or something. I remember those trips and I know I was very sad to come to that apartment where we used to go to my uncle's, right, where it was nice, and now the apartment was empty. So I was most interested in that, my uncle had a little workshop there, he was a big handyman, and I still have a lot of different handy things like micrometer screws, different tweezers, different screwdrivers, just different handy tools that I still use to this day."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 31.10.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:57:36
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 2

    Praha, 07.11.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 41:45
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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I was attracted to the fact that these were people who wanted to live their lives

Pavel Fiala in the second half of the 1980s
Pavel Fiala in the second half of the 1980s
photo: Archive of the witness

Pavel Fiala was born in Prague on 30 September 1956, a year later the family moved to Příbram with his older brother Tomáš. His father Jaromír was a pulmonary doctor, his mother Věra, née Špidlenová, worked at the National Committee. The occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies caught the family on vacation and caused the father to leave the Communist Party and the uncle emigrated with the whole family to Canada. When Pavel Fiala was 17 years old, tragedy struck the family when his mother died suddenly, which was hard for him to come to terms with. He spent six months in therapy in a mental institution, but still graduated from high school on time. He was exempted from compulsory military service due to health problems and in 1976 he started working at Czechoslovak Television (ČST) as a lighting technician, then trained remotely as an electrical engineer. Through a friend, he met a circle of people from the underground, who in the 1970s began to move to northern Bohemia, especially to the Litoměřice area, to the so-called houses. Pavel Fiala mainly visited the families of Viktor Parkan, Jiří Kubíček and Charlie Soukup in Řepčice. He found it enriching to meet people who wanted to live their own way and were therefore inconvenient to the communist regime and were persecuted by State Security (StB). The StB eventually liquidated the houses in various ways. Pavel Fiala moved to Úštěk in 1984, where he lived in an evangelical meeting house and worked as an electrician, but three years later he returned to his original job in Prague. In January 1989, he participated in demonstrations during Palach Week, helped spread the petition Several Sentences, and in November participated in mass demonstrations before the fall of the communist regime. The file State Security kept on him as a person under investigation was shredded in 1989. After the Velvet Revolution, his life did not change fundamentally; he worked at the Czech Television, enjoyed his freedom and the opportunity to travel. In 2023, Pavel Fiala was living in Prague.