Zdeněk Hovorka

* 1963

  • "The year 1989 came. The way I worked those shifts - morning, afternoon, night - [it was] physically quite demanding. I was away from Pilsen, away from my friends, I wasn't watching TV, I wasn't buying Red Law, I wasn't in touch with any of my community, any underground or any bands. I was going to the raves. [Because of all that] I didn't really notice that it was November '89, that something was happening. Actually, I didn't notice it until I was at the mine shaft, when they called us together, this [František] Bejvl and these communists from the central committee, where Bejvl was also. But he wasn't a bad person, he was just a communist. And now they started giving us training: 'This is all wrong! And you have to...' Because they started talking about strikes, and they were interested that we shouldn't go to the streets, that the miners - and between you and me, they are such simple miners, who works as a miner nowadays... These people just had money, they had apartments, they were happy, so the communists there had no problem to manipulate them and say, 'Look, this is just a counter-revolution. Remember the '68 [year], then they'll come in here and you'll have problems. So there were fifty, sixty communists in those mines, in those workplaces. And those communists, the older ones, they were basically my friends, they said, 'This is bullshit. Are you all right? You are.' So I was sort of in a kind of information vacuum. I didn't know anything. Then I came to Pilsen to see my mom. Well, she was sitting at home, [her eyes were] glued to the TV. She was telling me all about how she was walking around Pilsen... Now I started listening to it and I couldn't believe that something like that was possible."

  • "Dad said they wanted to start printing leaflets, just to do something against it [the communist regime]. He got into this group that... The circle of people in the army was bigger, about ten people. So one Hlavatý [Hlásenský, ed.] got in, if I'm not mistaken. And he was an agent of State Security [StB], a provocateur. The communist authorities simply wanted to expose potential perpetrators. So it was as if they were trying to provoke or organize some kind of crime so that quickly, without any damage, those future potential perpetrators could be found quickly and they could be quickly convicted. That's what happened. The Hlásenský guy, of course, organized it, gave it some culture, and then, of course, turned them all in. They were all taken into custody. And the ring... The interrogations began. Of course, it's the interrogations that are known, the beating... They had their methods. Dad talked mainly about methods: salty soup and no water, not being able to drink. And most of all - lack of sleep, just hands on the blanket, and as soon as they saw that someone's eyes were closed, they would wake up every ten minutes during the night. If a person fell asleep, they made him walk. And if you don't sleep for three, four days, you say, sign anything. These were simply methods implemented from Russia. I'm sure the beating was there too, but my father never wanted to talk about it, never talked about it in much detail. Probably because of me, because I would tell it at school as a kid and we'd all get in trouble."

  • "Dad was [totally deployed, but I only have] unverified information about it. He was maybe in Bordeaux, France, totally deployed as a diver. Because there was a big submarine port there and the Allies were bombing it. These concrete blocks under the water collapsed and he was supposedly diving in this copper hood, this suit. And he used to explain to me on our nature walks how to drill concrete underwater. That it's not drilled with a drill, that it's drilled with a scaffolding pipe that you blow oxygen into, and it actually burns through the concrete. That's the kind of thing I remember. He went partially deaf there too, he was deaf quite a lot, he had a problem with his eardrums, his ears all the time. All his life he said he got it from diving. Then he got to maybe - also this information from his story - to Munich or some Bavarian city like that, which was bombed. He was in some sort of commando unit that was tasked with carrying dead people out of the broken houses. And he said, 'In a fortnight you don't even think about it, it's a job like any other. You're clearing away the rubble of houses, you're carrying out dead, torn people on stretchers...' He was in total deployment and he was actually under the supervision of the Germans, so he couldn't defend himself in any way. And most importantly, he wanted to survive, which is what every civilian wants."

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    Plzeň, 08.08.2022

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    Plzeň, 12.08.2022

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My dad got the death penalty when he was twenty-three, and he knew it wasn’t some movie or theater, because the heads were really rolling around

Sixteen-year-old Zdeněk Hovorka
Sixteen-year-old Zdeněk Hovorka
photo: Archive of the witness

Zdeněk Hovorka was born on 29 March 1963 in Pilsen to Maria Hovorka, maiden name Belzová, and Miroslav Hovorka. His mother’s brother Robert Belza won many awards as a successful weightlifter. His great-grandfather Johann Hovorka earned the first lowest noble title for his service in the army. His mother was totally deployed in production in Kiefersfelden during the war, his father as a diver in Bordeaux, the base of the Italian and German submarine fleet. After that, he apparently carried the dead out of houses destroyed by air raids in Munich. On October 1, 1947, father enlisted in the army in Tábor, where, together with the clergyman Robert Bednařík, he formed a group of anti-communist-minded men, which was infiltrated by Klemen Hlásenský, a provocateur agent deployed by State Security and connected with the case of P. Josef Pojar. Miroslav Hovorka was arrested and sentenced to nineteen years of hard labour in a mock trial for military treason. From April 13, 1948 he was imprisoned in Domecek in Hradčany, then in Pankrác, in Plzeň in Bory and in the Correctional Labour Camp in Opava, where he worked on the mine shaft. He was released on amnesty on 12 April 1956 after eight years in prison. Zdeněk Hovorka trained as an electrician in Plzeň and began working for Water Works. In 1983 he graduated from the Škoda Secondary Vocational School in Skvrňany, but he did not complete his studies at the University of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in Pilsen. In order to avoid the war, he joined the Dobré Štěstí mine near Dobřany, where he finished as a gunner in 1991. In 1985 he had to enlist in the army in Pilsen, Slovany. In 1989 he signed the petition Several Sentences. On 3 February 1990 he took part in the march to Bavarian Iron Ore. From 1991 to 1994 he worked in the company Elektrizace železnicce Praha, which sent him to Germany and France for assembly. On 13 February 1996, he married Iveta Krausová from Plzeň in Florida, and they later raised two children together. Zdeněk Hovorka has been teaching at the Secondary Vocational Electrical Engineering School in Pilsen since 2020. At the time of filming (2022) he lived with his family in Vejprnice.