There were few Charter 77 signatories in our town, and the pressure on us was enormous
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Zdeněk Piras was born on 13 June 1952 in a family of an engineer from Karlovy Vary Josef Piras. His parents moved to Karlovy Vary in 1958 when they bought a family house in the Tuhnice quarter. He played electric guitar and founded his first bands from the end of elementary school. He graduated from the vocational school of measurement and regulation in Nová Paka. He managed to get a Blue booklet (Document of proof of incapacity for military service – trans.) and after graduating from vocational school, he spent four years as an employee of the fuel combined company in Vřesová. He later worked in District Housing Enterprise in Karlovy Vary. He founded amateur bands Zase and Spektrum. He was in touch with representatives of the North Bohemian underground and visited them in “houses” from the second half of the 1970s. In 1978, he became one of the first Charter 77 signatories in Karlovy Vary and found himself under enormous political pressure. Because of that, his older sister Eva emigrated in 1985, the family had to sell their family house in Tuhnice and he and his wife Jana got divorced. After it, Zdeněk Piras lived in a dilapidated house in Nové Sedlo, which he reconstructed on his own.
