“Every time when we needed to do laundry…I had a girl in Postoloprty, in the dentist’s office…and later I also illegally played soccer for them... I played in Teplice… and the dentist, she was a nice girl, and beautiful, too, and she would always write a leave for me for a dentist appointment, for two days, for example… always for the afternoon, and I could use the leave in any way I wanted... We were not allowed to have anything there, we were there with this guy and he had a motorbike, hidden in one guy’s place in Postoloprty. And we got on and we went to Kladno, to Jirousy... I would always write to my aunt beforehand that we would arrive... and she would prepare food for us and throw our dirty laundryin the washing machine. We would eat, and when the laundry was done, we would put it into the backpack while it was still wet and ride back to Postoloprty…and dry it there... the shirts, underwear… There was nobody to do laundry for us, and no place where to do that… Some people were sending it to somebody, but I did not have anybody... I did not have anybody like that... my mother was in Beřkovice, I was doing my military service, my brother was in prison and my father was dying.”
“In reality, you did not need any great act… You did not need that…What mattered was just an opinion. You had your opinion, your own opinion, and you did not even need to spread it –only to those people who were your opponents in the personal contact; you let it be known to them.”
Vladimír Kadeřábek was born on July 24, 1929. He grew up in Úvaly u Prahy. During the war he apprenticed in a foodstore.. wholesale store and he wanted to become a salesman. At the end of the 1940s his brother was imprisoned for political reasons and his father was interrogated. His mother suffered a psychic breakdown due to this and she was hospitalized in the psychiatric hospital in Beřkovice. In 1950 Vladimír was drafted to do his military service in the Auxiliary Technical Battalions where he served for a total of 28 months - at first in Postoloprty at a construction of the airport in Žatec and then in Ostrava and eventually in mines in Stochov near Kladno. After completing his military service he was ordered to continue working in the Stochov mines, but he ignored the order and instead he found a job for an airline where he then kept working until his retirement. After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies to Czechoslovakia in August 1968 he and his wife had their son Ivan renamed to Václav as a small form of protest against the occupation. Until the Velvet Revolution both of them faced various troubles from the communist regime, such as with admission of their children to universities.
