Major Jiří Jícha

* 1957

  • "I was chairman of the union organisation at the time, which was a vacant position. [Miroslav] Plíšek was put into the infirmary to rehabilitate himself, so I discussed it with him many times. And any misconduct? How do you look for [it] in a guy who's been serving for six months? It's easy to say today, being a police officer after thirty-nine years of service. Inexperienced boy. He couldn't have acted any other way. Nowadays, they'd send ten, fifteen people against a defector who would... If he fired once, they'd eliminate him from a safe place and take cover. And it wouldn't have turned out the way it did. Unfortunately, Miloš Kukla's kidneys failed in the hospital. And after his parents visited him - he normally talked to them and looked forward to coming home - he died a day or two after they visited him in the hospital. Then, I attended his funeral. Together with Plíšek and other soldiers. There was also this thing that nobody was able to tell Plíšek that Kukla had died. And now the unit was rehearsing the honour salute for the funeral. Plíšek heard the salvos and said, 'Kukla died.' And they said, 'Don't be silly.' Then the doctor told him because the professional soldiers were so cowardly, they didn't tell Plíšek."

  • "The guard checking the entrance noticed an old man walking past the barracks, in the field, one hundred and fifty, two hundred meters from the barracks. Whereupon he reported it to the unit supervisor, who wanted to send him there. Fortunately, the elder of the unit, a sergeant-major named Král, was there, and he told him not to go crazy, not to send a man with a bayonet. So he sent Lance Corporal Plíšek and Private Kukla from the guard. It was an armed guard equipped with sixty bullets. They had bullets in the chamber. The weapon was only secured. The two armed men went to check on the so-called grandpa. I'm not sure at all... I don't think they knew they were going after a military defector! Kukla served two months. Plíšek for six months. Completely inexperienced soldiers. Plíšek was an instructor in the non-commissioned officers' school, Kukla was a soldier who was only preparing to become a commander."

  • "At the apprenticeship, at the age of eighteen, I was offered to study at an industrial engineering high school. It was conditional on my signing an application for the Party because they needed working-class cadres. Engineers had a problem, for example. Engineers applied to join the Party, but they couldn't accept an engineer unless five workers joined. They had a quota for that. At eighteen, you didn't think about it. My parents were in the Party, so I signed it. I wanted to study. I wanted to make something of myself, like every young person. You had different ideals. Nowadays, you look at it very differently. I didn't know about the 1950s until I was at SNB College, where Associate Professor Laurinec gave me a text, I think in my third year, about the Slánský trial. I had to read it in his office. He knew that he could trust me, so he gave me this book, saying: 'So that you know that those times were not so rosy.' CUT I found the speech of Prosecutor Urválek before the state court completely incomprehensible. That speech is well-known. Then, what was incomprehensible to me in that book was how these people confessed. I didn't find that out until I read Arthur London's confession, how they were treated. The book didn't say why. How can someone come forward and confess to being an imperialist and Zionist agent?"

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 15.11.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 02:08:09
  • 2

    Ostrava, 28.05.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 02:06:19
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

After November 17, we were like snivelling dogs. Everybody hated the SNB

Jiří Jícha - soldier of basic service - in uniform of the Border Guard in 1979
Jiří Jícha - soldier of basic service - in uniform of the Border Guard in 1979
photo: archive of Jiří Jícha

Jiří Jícha was born on 11 April 1957 in Český Těšín. He grew up in Třinec. His parents were members of the Communist Party. After training as a toolmaker, he graduated from the mechanical engineering school in Opava. As a student, he joined the Communist Party. At the end of the seventies, he completed his basic military service at the Border Guard near Mariánské Lázně. In 1979, he witnessed the death of a border guard shot during a clash with a military defector. After the war, he joined the National Security Corps (SNB) and became an investigator for the Public Security Service (VB). From 1985 to 1989, he studied at the Faculty of Investigation of the SNB College in Bratislava. After the fall of the communist regime, he joined the Police of the Czech Republic. From 1993 to 2019, he worked as an investigator at the Regional Bureau of Investigation in Ostrava, where he held the position of head of the Economic Crime Department for several years. One of the most complex cases of his career was the investigation of the high-speed train crash in Studénka in 2008, in which eight people died and nearly 100 passengers were injured. In 2024, he was living in Nový Jičín.