I’ll never forget the sight of the stairs covered in the protesters´ blood
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Petr Jílek was born on 4 December 1956 to a Catholic family in Polička. His parents, Ladislav and Marie Jílek, were private farmers. They had six children and farmed in nearby village Oldřiš. Until 1961 they resisted pressure to join a cooperative farm. From an early age, the witness worked on the farm and helped in the cooperative farm. The family was Catholic, and because of this, the children experienced bullying by teachers and were not allowed to study. The witness trained as a gardener. The family felt strongly about the Prague Spring in 1968 and the subsequent occupation by the Warsaw Pact troops. In the 1970s, the witness served his military service and went for a training in the Soviet Union as well. He was shocked by the reality of life in the communist superpower. From the early 1980s he was active in the Czechoslovak Union for Nature Conservation, cooperated with the Brontosaurus ecological movement, and he was a leader of a nature club within the Pioneer Organization. In the 1990s he kept in touch with Brno dissidents and distributed samizdat literature. In October 1988, he participated in a demonstration on the anniversary of the [independent Czechoslovak] Republic, where he was arrested and interrogated by State Security. From then on, State Security took interest in him and, among other things, exerted pressure on the employer to dismiss him. In November 1989, he became involved in the revolutionary events in Brno. He helped distribute leaflets. Later, in free political situation, he worked as a garden designer for private owners. In 2020, he was already retired and was living in Polička.
