Pavel Hlavatý

* 1943

  • “The exhibition was supposed to end on a certain date, but they came to me from the culture house, saying lots of people were still coming to see it, if I could extend it for another week. And that was a mistake, because at that time Mr Bobrek from the mine shaft, a member of the Central Committee, sensed the opportunity, had it photographed, and those photographs found their way to Gustáv Husák, who, in his inauguration speech, when he was aspiring for the position of General Secretary, mentioned that his comrades from Ostrava had shown him photographic evidence of a purely anti-Soviet exhibition, which was funded with workers’ money. But that was already after the police had come to take it apart. If it had ended normally, I would’ve had the exhibition pieces at home, and of course someone would’ve warned me: ‘Tear it up, they’re coming for you!’ I was teaching at the school at the time, and suddenly I got an anonymous call: ‘Don’t go to Havířov, the culture house is swarming with police, they’ll take you right in!’ But I lived not far from there, so I got out there. Mrs Němcová was standing in front of the culture house, she was chief of the regional Communist party - the positive one, which people had been joining since the beginning of 1968, and then in droves after the occupation - lots of lawyers were there, and they wanted to take the exhibition away, claiming they’d take photos of it and bring it back next morning. A week later I got another heads up: ‘They’re coming your way, burn that exhibition!’ Because it represented the corpus delicti, that which had perpetrated the crime. The police took the lift up to the seventh floor, and two people went down the stairs from our place and took the parcel to the cottage, where it remained for several years. I declared that I had burnt it, but they used the guestbook against me. The exhibition was visited by both trainees and teachers, and one boy wrote something improper there, so it served as the corpus delicti to show that I had caused mass anti-Soviet hysteria.”

  • “I hadn’t had pain like that before. Fever rising, I go to the doctor, he looks at my papers and says: ‘Oh, you’re going home, I understand, you don’t want to work.’ I said: ‘No, sir, I’m sick, do something with me.’ He prescribed me a syrup, he assumed I had the flu or a cough. But someone drank my syrup up because the only drugs available in prison back then were tonic pills for asthma, Astmatol and Yastyl. After two or three pills you’d feel inebriated. Outside, you’d buy ten for 15 crowns, but there you paid 30 crowns for five before Christmas. I never tried it. I was afraid I’d like it. They also brewed ‘woozifier’ - you took 3.5 litres of tea infusion, added one Georgian cognac and all the pills available. They sipped at it all through the evening and went to bed all woozy. Those who had Yastyl, they didn’t sleep. I was used to going to sleep at 4 o’clock because I didn’t use to teach until the afternoon, and now I was supposed to get up at 4, but I was only just falling asleep. And these boys who couldn’t sleep, they were glad they had someone who listened to them. Nonetheless, the day before my release the doctor wrote that I was completely healthy. So I left the prison on Sunday, and at 7 a.m. on Monday I was in hospital because I had phoned some friends who were doctors, and they told me: ‘Don’t move, that’s rheumatic fever!’ When they took me in at the hospital, my sedimentation measured at 67 on the first mark, 107 on the second, so that if the prison doctor had tested that, he would have had no doubt it was rheumatism. My friends, the doctors, said: ‘Keep lying, don’t move.’ The synovial fluid was starting to decay, and the joints suffer. And in a week the sedimentation went to something like 3 or 5, nobody believed it possible to get down so fast. I also had children’s rheumatism, where they injected the medicine into us, or they gave us this yellow-green-brown liquid, Salicyl. I left hospital after two months, but I stayed at home and recovered on sick leave for another four months.”

  • “I participated in the attempt to remove MP Drahomír Kolder. That’s an interesting matter because nowadays MPs are unremovable, but because back then there was just one party ruling, it was very simple: if you voted in Havířov, you voted Kolder. And really, within three days we collected some 30,000 signatures together with the person’s address and a more-or-less legible signature. So a group of people set out from Havířov to Smrkovský, as the head of the National Assembly, to hand over the petition to him. But he didn’t remove him. Kolder withdrew a bit, then he was made ambassador in Bulgaria, he was called ‘the apricot ambassador’ I think, then he came back, started ‘cooking up’ some trouble, but then he died.”

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    Praha, 20.10.2014

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“I created a space where I wouldn’t be bored, where I wouldn’t suffer.”

Pavel Hlavatý portrait
Pavel Hlavatý portrait
photo: Archiv paměti národa

Pavel Hlavatý, painter, graphic artist, and art collector, was born on the 4th of February, 1943 in Albrechtice near Turnov. He was seven and a half years old when he was sent to a children’s home in Turnov shortly before his mother’s death. After the younger children’s home was merged in 1952, he was brought up by his mother’s sister Eleonora Reslová in Liberec, and then by his older sister in Nový Bor. After attending grammar school for one year, he switched to the State Art School of Doctor Zdeněk Nejedlý in Uherské Hradiště, where he studied the visual arts. He received a “blue book” excusing him from military service, and as a graduate he began work as a building designer at Julius Fučík Mine in Petřvald. He rented a flat in the nearby city of Havířov, and  began teaching at a school. Until 1968, he drew drawings for the satirical magazine Dikobraz (Porcupine) and Literární noviny (Literary News), and he wrote reports from places like Austria and Paris. The first time he exhibited his works was at the Young People’s Exhibition in Ostrava in 1968. After the Warsaw Pact invasion, he actively helped organise the petition calling for the removal of parliamentary representative and co-author of the “letter of invitation” (on which pretext the Warsaw Pact armies invaded the country), Drahomír Kolder, for which he was charged with defaming a state functionary under Section 103 of Czech law. He was also punished for creating the “anti-Soviet” exhibition Protestkresby 68 (Protest Pictures 68), this time for defaming a state of the worldwide Socialist network and its representatives under Section 104. He fell ill with rheumatic fever while at the Heřmanice Correctional Facility in Ostrava-Hrušov, and as the illness was not addressed, he spent another two months in hospital after his release and never fully recovered from the damage it caused. When the Union of Visual Artists was dissolved, he was not registered into the Czech Fund, and he was thus barred from selling his art through the centralised distribution company Dílo (Work). He was not allowed to exhibit, teach, lecture, or export his works abroad, magazines and newspapers had his name blacklisted, and so he drew under various pseudonyms. Once every three months he was questioned on his means of living, he had to report whom he had met with, but he managed to keep his studio and his free artist license. With the help of friends he was able to exhibit his works abroad, where he obtained 54 awards and managed to secure a living for himself even during the normalisation period. In 1983, he married for a second time.