"Well, I came to Hulín and someone was ringing, the same afternoon, so I went to open, and the boys. I don't know how many there were - five, I think. They came and I knew only one of them - the teacher who came there Jarda Mikeš. And he said to me, 'Franta, please, we're doing some things here about the Civic Forum, we don't know what it is and how it will be. And you were supposed to be in Prague.' So, I told them what was going on. 'Well, wouldn't you like to be the leader of the Civic Forum here then?' Because they were young boys around 25 years old, they had no life experience yet. And the citizens probably wouldn't follow them, while they already knew me. Well and on the twenty-fifth I was in Prague, on the thirtieth I invited the representatives from Prague to be with us at the establishment of the Civic Forum."
"When I learned after November 17 that there would be a big meeting in Letná on the twenty-fifth I didn't hesitate, I took a boy, my wife was in the hospital, we were alone at home, so he was 12 years old, and we went to Prague to go there. To Letná. Well a fantastic experience! Then, at about ten o'clock, I put the boy at the station to sit in the waiting room. And I was at the Václav all night listening to what was happening there."
"As soon as I saw it on TV, we wrote a letter to his mother. We expressed our condolences to her, to the death, to support her to endure it, the pain that had occurred. But then we were really worried if the police might pick the letter somewhere, but nothing happened, it was fine. We did that, it was fair."
¨"I wasn't interested in politics at the time at all, I was just upset about that, when the inspections were then, the inspection commissions. So, from October 1, I took over the management of the company. And then they called me, the commission, if I agree, etc. I say, 'I do not agree, because this is occupation actually.' Then I could not do anything for 20 years. Well you have a mark, yeah, you didn't pass the commission. So, I was having a “great” time for 20 years. But every cloud has a silver lining."
"The year 1965 came and we worked there, Žilina did not know it, Majáles (the spring celebration). Boys, girls, everyone. Majáles lasted a week. That was really the revivalistic process that took place. So, it was really unrestrained, but decent at the same time."
František Pivoda was born on March 29, 1943 in Holešín near Boskovice. As a child, he helped his parents on a seven-hectare private farm. In May 1945, the village was liberated by Romanian soldiers. In the 1950s, he experienced the collectivization of agriculture in Holešín, and his father was eventually forced to lead a local unified agricultural cooperative (collective farm). In 1966, the witness graduated from the University of Transport in Žilina, specialization in the security technology. At the end of the same year, he got married and immediately began one year of military service with the railway army in Břeclav. He and his wife Svatava built a house in Hulín, where three children were gradually born, a daughter and two sons. František worked in the company Sdělovací a zabezpečovací distance Přerov, in the autumn of 1968 he expressed his disagreement with the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the troops of the Warsaw Pact states. This decision had a very negative impact on his career in the following 20 years. During the normalization, the witness founded a boating club and thus he made use of his skills in the education of young people for this sport. In November 1989, he became the chairman of the Civic Forum in Hulín, then he became involved in politics until the first free elections in June 1990. Now (2019) František Pivoda is retired and lives with his second wife in Hulín.
