Lubomír Khýr

* 1969

  • "We went in the direction of náměstí Svobody (Freedom Square), to seek out groups, which we could join at some protest. But policemen stood there and directed us to a side street. We went along that street and were stopped by civilists, it was Státní bezpečnost [State Security], and immediately they handed us over to the uniformed members of Veřejná bezpečnost [Public Security]. ID card check, being written down. And they took Vladimír Veselský to the side. He performed in public back then as a speaker for Moravská mládež [Moravian Youth] and the declaration of Moravská mládež was being read out on Svobodná Evropa [Radio Free Europe], so it was already a monitored subject. And so Vladimír was taken to the side and we didn't know, what was going on there. We stood out on the road, between us, the sidewalk and the displays there was high car, I don't know, if it was a police Avia. Then we heard the screeching of glass breaking and some sort of scream. They drove us out of there. Later we learned that they had thrown him through the shop display and accused him of attacking a public officer."

  • "One meeting was important for me in that period, when they arrested Standa Devátý. We had had work meetings, where we created protest posters, these big banners from sewed together bed sheets, on which we, I don't know anymore, if we sprayed or painted them, wrote: 'Stanislav Devátý arrested.' I wrote it in my technical script, which I had well-learned from school. And we hung those posters in Brno in Česká street, all the way up there, where there's an intersection in the shape of a T and where the trams go in all directions, to say the trams from Brno. At the busiest time, so that as many people as possible would see it, that is to say around three o'clock, when people were going home from work, we installed it there. We tied it with strings to the railings, where there similar attention grabbers, that invited people to football matches. We covered those over. The next day we then also threw out lots of pamphlets there, with information about who Stanislav Devátý was and why he was arrested."

  • "Back then I lived at the dormitory Průmyslové stavby Brno in Komárov and little ways from the dormitory lived Dalibor Havlík, whom I had met in a pub to which I used to go. He grabbed my attention, because he had long hair and read books. I started conversing with him, he started talking with me. When he found out, that I have sickles and hammers in my head, as if it were something normal, he started lending me books and magazines. Mostly exile literature. It was a shock to me. I remember, that I was walking enthralled in my dreams for two months. Nobody could talk with me. I was approaching suicide, because my whole world had been shattered. I felt I had been deceived. I was angry at my parents, at school, at that whole system, that it had been deceiving me the whole time."

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    Ostrava, 11.04.2022

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When I realized how the communists were making fools of us, I started to sabotage them

Lubomír Khýr / around the year 1989
Lubomír Khýr / around the year 1989
photo: Archiv pamětníka

Lubomír Khýr was born on the 20th of April 1969 in Rýmařov in the Bruntálsko region. He grew up in Břidličná. He studied at the industrial construction school in Opava. In the year 1988 he temporarily moved to Brno, where he started attending the preparatory year for Vysoké učení technické (High Technical Education) and simultaneously working as a construction worker. In Brno he met people from the dissent. He participated in giving out samizdat literature, pamphlets and petitions for the release of political prisoners and participated in protests. He jointly founded the initiative Moravská mládež (Moravian Youth). He also participated in the activities of Společnosti přátel USA (Group of Friends of the USA) and Hnutí za nenásilí (Movement for Non-Violence). He was a witness to the Velvet Revolution in Brno. After the year 1989 he moved to Opava. He married and three sons were born to him. He changed through a variety of professions. For fifteen years he worked in banking. Then he moved to Hněvošice in the Hlučínsko region. In the year 2016 an eye problem was detected, due to which he lost about eighty-five percent of his eyesight. From a young age he invested himself into music, in his disability retirement the composition and playing of blues songs became his main activity. In the year 2022 he lived in Hněvošice in the Hlučínsko region.