So that others can take hold of that hope
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Jan Hrabina was born on January 1, 1954 in Prague. His parents were employed in a foreign trade business specialising in industrial porcelain. Between 1958 and 1960, the family therefore lived in Damascus. Between 1966 to 1970 they spent their time in Budapest due to the work commitments of the mother and father. After the political and social changes initiated by the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops, the parents’ jobs were filled by other employees who were more loyal to the new conditions. From the beginning of the 70s, Jan continued to grow up in Prague, where he graduated a little later. At the same time, he met a group from the circle of the Evangelical Theological Faculty, including Vratislav Brabenec, Svatopluk Karásek and Aleš Březina, among others. Jan found his way to the evangelical youth organisation and a little later also to the Na Topolce Baptist Church. During the 1970s, he made a living, for example, as a playground security guard, a worker at a sewage treatment plant, or he would glue posters. In 1977, he added his signature to the Charter declaration. He also repeatedly applied to study theology, thereby delaying his enlistment. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, he served nineteen months of civilian service in the ČKD, but he repeatedly ignored the conscription order, which called for him to spend the next five months at an army unit. Based on this, he was arrested on May 4, 1981 and sentenced to two and a half years in prison in June. Between December and January 1982, he served his sentence in prison in Bory, where he met Václav Havel, Jiří Dienstbier and Dominik Duka, among others. After parole, he joined the unit based in Strašice near Pilsen for the remaining five months of the war. Later, in addition to other dissident activities, he devoted himself to the distribution of samizdat publications such as Infoch (Information about Charter 77) and Zpravodaj VONS. At the end of the 1980s, he had a cyclostyle in his apartment, on which he printed the pages of the samizdat magazine SPORT. During the Velvet Revolution, he participated in the running of the Independent Press Center. In the following two years, he worked as the first chief operating officer of Respekt magazine. He was rehabilitated in 1995 and in 2017 he was granted the status of a participant in the resistance and resistance against communism.
