Zdeněk Hůrka

* 1960

  • "My dad, by signing Two Thousand Words and failing the background checks, he faced expulsion from school. He had health problems, and by the time that expulsion happened, he was on disability and had been on disability for a long time, I think two or three years. Then he had to go before a medical assessment board which found him fit for work, so he applied to be taken back into education, and I remember he got a cyclostyled letter saying, 'Due to the optimum dislocation of teaching staff we can't employ you, apply again in six months'.Dad of course had to go to work because it was compulsory to work, they wouldn't take him anywhere, because he had worked in physical education all his life, he wanted to work there for example. But he ended up working in a paper mill as a paint mixer, working two days in the afternoon, two days in the morning, two days at night and two days off, which was hard work at the end of his professional life, considering he was a secondary school professor and had never worked manually. Six months later he applied again and again he got that cyclostyled letter, 'Due to the optimal dislocation of the teaching staff, we can't hire you, please apply again in six months.' So it went on for two or three years and one day this letter came and the last sentence was crossed out."

  • "We experienced such an interesting case first hand in September '83' at Babylon when we were serving in the camp. We had this trailer there and our job was to see if any East German citizens tried to cross the border. For us, of course, it was a lucrative service because we were out of the barracks for a week, we got some money when we were older, and we would pick up food in the kitchen. Even a weekend in September some schools came there and we spent it in convivial fun with the girls. In the morning we were woken up by a phone call from the operations officer to see if anyone was missing from the camp. So we didn't know anything, we said wait a minute, we'll try and find out. We went to the reception and we met the receptionist who said that there were three German women crying, saying that their husbands hadn't come back from their trip in the evening, that they had gone to Domažlice and they hadn't come back. So we wrote down their personal data, called the operations officer, and he saw that we must have hit the nail on the head. So a raiding party from Domažlice went out, and they arrived and started to interrogate the women, and since nobody spoke German, they called me in."

  • "We were called to the border crossing at Folmava, there was a guy there, about thirty years old, long hair, I liked him at first sight. I came there with the interrogator from the military counter-intelligence from Domažlice and now they were asking him where he came from, because he was brought here on the basis of a denunciation by the border guards' assistants, I think from Pec pod Čerchovem. He said that he had come here, he was a Yugoslav, he had worked in Germany, he had come here on holiday and he had used various forms of travel, hitchhiking, taking trains, riding on freight trains and getting lost on the way back. And he asked where the Folmava border crossing was, that was the question that alerted the local border guards. They brought him to the crossing and I arrived there with a military counterintelligence officer, who questioned him, asked him how he got here, what he was doing, where he was working. Then he asked him where he lived. He said the name of a German town and he said, 'There are barracks there.' And he said, 'Yes, I live opposite those barracks.' Now the intelligence officer wanted to know from him what kind of equipment there was, what kind of cars there were, what kind of register plates they had, just unbelievable things. The guy didn't say anything and ended up saying to him, 'Do you ever want to go to Czechoslovakia again?' He said, 'Of course I do.' 'Well, tell me, or you won't come here again.' He then had to promise to monitor these things and that they would meet and that he would give him the information, how that turned out I don't know anymore, of course."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Plzeň, 14.08.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 56:33
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
  • 2

    Plzeň, 19.06.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 45:20
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
  • 3

    Plzeň, 26.07.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 07:20
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
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I was supposed to be guarding the border against trespassers

Zdeněk Hůrka in the 1980s
Zdeněk Hůrka in the 1980s
photo: Witness´s archive

Zdeněk Hůrka was born on 15 April 1960 in Pilsen. Both of his parents taught at the Klement Gottwald Secondary School of Economics (now the Business Academy), but his father Lubomír Hůrka was professionally demoted during the normalisation period for signing the Two Thousand Words declaration. Zdeněk Hůrka came out of the primary school with expanded language teaching with the cadre assessment sstating: “The family environment does not guarantee an education towards socialism.” In spite of his excellent school results, he therefore entered the apprenticeship of mechanical locksmith completed with secondary school graduation at the Škoda factory in Plzeň. In 1980, he managed to get an approval for buying foreign currency and hitchhiked through capitalist foreign countries with a friend. In 1982, he entered compulsory military service with the Border Guard in Domažlice. Thanks to his brilliant knowledge of German, he was to work as a so-called searcher, i.e. to walk around in civilian clothes and pick out possible border trespassers. He also interpreted interrogations of people who were detained in connection with crossing the state border. After the Velvet Revolution, he was finally able to pursue his professional career more freely and pursue his hobbies, working, among other things, as a presenter of the first West Bohemian private radio FM Plus.