Zdeněk Jeník

“The family branch of my grandparents was quite unusual within our family because the year 1948 was key, as it has afflicted our family greatly. When I say family, I mean my grandfather and his children. Because they had all been self-employed, businessmen, senior officials, one was a banker. So the Communist coup d’état struck their lives significantly. They were fired from their jobs, their businesses were nationalized or confiscated. The only branch of my family that wasn’t affected by 1948 was my grandfather’s branch. He was the only one from the whole extended family who had joined the Communist Party before 1948. And with him my sixteen or seventeen-year-old father. So, it is odd that while my great uncles and uncles were being persecuted, one of them was even imprisoned for more than ten years between 1949 and 1959/1960, you could say that my direct family profited from the communist take-over, so to speak. Meaning that it launched my direct relatives’ careers. But it didn’t last that long after all, because, as we all know, the year 1968 came and the table started to turn.”

“We made it to Wroclaw where I first saw prince Schwarzenberg; writer Ota Filip was there too and of course singer-songwriters like Jaroslav Hutka or Sváťa Karásek. And then a person from a totally different planet – Karel Kryl. I had known that he lived somewhere in Germany and that he was actually a real, living person. But he had been so vilified by the Communists in Czechoslovakia, even though his songs were sung at every bonfire and in every dorm. He had been like a mythical figure and all of a sudden, he was standing there, playing his guitar and afterwards I went to see him in the changing rooms and we talked for a while. And that was… I was ecstatic. Apart from the concerts, there were conferences on the future of Europe and on the post-Communist future. And then the festival was over and from Poland we had to return back to the communist cage. It was a difficult return home. And imagine it was November 6, just eleven days prior to November 17.”

“After 1968 or rather 1969, my family… My father was firde from his headmaster job and couldn’t find any new one. He couldn’t even find a worker job anywhere in the Karviná district, although he did work here and there but he always got fired eventually. So we moved to Krnov to my father’s parents. That was the second, less happy part of my childhood. Because coming from that big beautiful apartment we suddenly found ourselves in a hostile environment, in a strange city, in a tiny ugly old building with four rooms, where the seven of us lived and where each room was heated with a stove. It was all dark and dingy and I didn’t have any friends there of course. We were much worse off.”

“Until 1969 or 1970 we had a somewhat idyllic life in Karviná, where my parents were doing very well. My father was a headmaster of a secondary school, my mother taught at a primary school. We had a big, three-room apartment. And then came the year 1968, during which my reformist father became involved in the democratization of the society and all the new ideas that 1968 brought. Which was quite difficult in the Karviná region, as it had been a strongly Stalinist region and it became even worse after the August 1968 Warsaw Pact Invasion when my father was sent as a delegate to the famous 14th extraordinary meeting of the Communist Party to denounce the invasion, which he did. He then came back from the meeting, was further engaged, wrote newspaper articles, appeared on TV and even called on the Russian garrison to leave the Karviná region – by doing that, he basically sealed his fate for the following twenty years.”