“A house search was conducted two weeks after the currency reform. I was participating in a group exercise in the Sokol sports ground. It was called Sokol Say and they had some performance there, with local members of Sokol doing a public performance of their exercise. They installed a horizontal bar outside in the sports ground, and they performed gymnastic exercises. The Sokol gym was near our home. With my sports uniform still on, I ran home to show it to my parents and to grab a snack. When I ran out to the market square, I noticed that there were people coming from the square and looking to the right. It was nine o’clock in the morning on Sunday. They were all looking towards our house. At that time the police still used vehicles in khaki colours like the military ones. There were two Tudor combat cars, and I could see that in front of our glass door there was a policeman with a submachine gun, and I knew that it was bad. I grabbed the door handle and started crying. My uncle from Nové Hrady had gotten arrested last Saturday. Nové Hrady is seven kilometres from Proseč. They had a shop, the same as we had. My aunt got arrested later as well, when they found out that half of the house was owned by her. Therefore, we already knew that the police had been there searching their house and that they had arrested my uncle and taken him away. Now, I came running home from the Sokol gym and saw these Tudor combat vehicles and the uniformed policeman with a submachine gun. They brought my mom there. I was crying and kicking the door. My mom tried to calm me down, and she said: ´Don’t be afraid, daddy has everything in order. Don’t worry, nothing bad will happen.´”
“Karel Kyncl appeared at the Communist Party municipal committee. Later, he became a BBC reporter. Karel Kyncl Award is being awarded now, and all journalists know who Karel Kyncl was. He was reporting from London, and I used to listen to his broadcasts. I was thus able to listen to these two speeches. I was copying them on a copy paper. There were no other means of copying at that time. There was the ormik machine or the manifold machine, but all stencils had to be registered and archived. StB was conducting inspections, and it was not easy to cheat, because each stencil had a registration number and if they found that one was missing, it obviously gave them grounds for prosecution. I was thus copying it on a copy paper. You could do ten copies, but the tenth one was barely legible, and the first one was damaged by the typewriter, as if the letters were typed through. So, it was hard work. When I created a few pamphlets like this, it was drudgery. I was copying this speech by Karel Kyncl and doctor Kriegel, and in order to increase its impact over a larger area than just my immediate surroundings, I would be riding trains at night, mostly the express train from Choceň to Pardubice, and whenever we passed through a station, I would go to the last car and throw out some pamphlets from of the window of the lavatory.”
“I was still a little boy at that time. All the older people were telling me: ´You cannot remember anything.´ But, I do have some fragmented memories from the end of the war. I remember when they shot a Vlasov army soldier in front of our house. He had blond hair. He was about eighteen. I nearly walked out to the gunfire. My mom grabbed me and quickly took me home. I ran out in front of the house again, and I saw wonderfully yellow sand there. A child and sand, that just goes together. I scooped this wonderfully yellow sand with my hands, and all of a sudden my hands were all covered with blood. Mom ran to me and washed my hands, because this sand had been used to cover the blood of this Vlasov soldier.”
“The best teachers I knew got kicked out. They dismissed teacher Morávka, he was then working in the cooperative and carrying bags. When we met him on our way to school, we would always greet him, and with the bag over his shoulders he would nod his head. Teacher Háb was working in a quarry. He actually got dismissed twice. Later, he even got promoted to work in an administrative position in that quarry. Another person to be dismissed was teacher Kmenta. He was a man of a very weak body. He was short and weak, and he was then carrying bricks to the brick kiln in Polička. His wife got dismissed from her job. She was earning her living by knitting sweaters. She was earning about two hundred and fifty crowns a month. Teacher Krejcar was dismissed, too. He was the one who had sent me for the twigs, when I discovered the hidden gun there. He was driving a tractor in the local agricultural cooperative. He was nearly two metres high. It was difficult for him to bend his legs in order to fit into the tractor driver’s seat. He was wearing a hat on his head, it was the type of hat nicknamed Russian forushka or Masaryk hat. He would always greet us, with a cigarette holder without a cigarette in his mouth. He was a typical character with that cigarette holder and hat, and his tractor. We always said hello to him. I also attended his funeral, of course.”
“I got dismissed from school after 1968, too. We had to undergo examination. Each of us was biting the tip of the pen and thinking what to write. It was partly my own response that got me kicked out, because in the questionnaire we were given, I wrote precisely this: ´As for the questions 1 through 10 in this questionnaire: I believe that this questionnaire itself stands for an unprecedented campaign in the Czechoslovak education system. Based on my previous experience, I am not convinced that this questionnaire will serve for objective evaluation of our professional and moral qualifications, but merely as an instrument for possible repression. For this reason I ask your understanding for my distrust to this campaign, and for the reasons for my refusal to take part in it.´ I signed the paper and handed it to them, and I was out in the twinkling of an eye."
Mgr. František Nekvinda was born in 1941 in Proseč near Skuteč. When he was a little boy, he witnessed the communists confiscating their family shop and trying to defame his entire family. His aunt and uncle from Nové Hrady were imprisoned. The Secret Police covertly hid a gun in their garden, which František incidentally discovered, and thus saved his father from long-term imprisonment. His father, however, was prosecuted for speculation in the late 1950s. The trial was adjourned several times, and his father was eventually not sentenced. As a son of a small trader, František Nekvinda had limited opportunities for studying, but eventually he managed to go through distance learning courses and become a teacher. During the Prague Spring in 1968, he was involved in the struggle for democracy and human rights in Dolní Újezd, and he tried to continue even after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies. He was disseminating pamphlets informing about the real situation in the country, attending meetings, and helping political prisoners who had been unjustly sentenced in the 1950s. In 1969, these activities led to his dismissal from his teaching job, and for several years he had to work the worst jobs in non-skilled professions and live under constant surveillance by the Secret Police. In the late 1970s, thanks to the help of his friend Jiří Šeda, he could return to teaching, and he eventually obtained a master’s degree through distance study. Now he is a member of the union of teachers and professionals in education who were persecuted for political reasons. In 2009, he received the highest award in his profession: the Medal of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports.
