Jan Šinogl

“Dad told me that there was a great number of people during the war who were informing Germans about other people, but after the war they turned into great partisans very quickly. Those informers suddenly became partisans and Red Guards. I saw this in 1968, too, when people suddenly changed so quickly. And I saw the absolutely same thing on myself very intensely after 1989. It was completely the same. From informers who had been informing upon us, when perhaps only three families from the village talked to us, and nobody else, and after 1989, and even more so after I became the mayor here, they all suddenly turned into great friends and they were saying how they had been thinking about us, and so on. And I am sure that this is a completely natural human phenomenon, when one needs to cover up one's conscience which blames him for something. It is a total turn-over and covering up of the black thoughts in one’s mind. I believe that this is a phenomenon which repeats itself in history over and over again.”

“After certain period of time we were always being summoned to the StB with the notice that they wanted to talk to us, but to each of us separately, not together. When we were going there in the early 1980s, they felt self-assured. They threatened us, and they forced us to request emigration passports. My wife wanted to leave the country, but I didn’t feel like it. They kept suggesting to us that if we did not stop our activity, then things would become bad for us. On top of that, somebody attempted to hijack a crop duster airplane here: there were two families from Brodek u Prostěova, and we got involved in it so much that the whole village thought that I had piloted the airplane, but we didn’t know those people at all. I only heard when they were starting the engine of the airplane and it flew for a short time and then there was a crash and it was down on the ground. There were two families - four adults and four children. I went to them when the plane crashed and I told them that I would do something for them if they needed. And one of the women asked me to send a message to her grandparents in Brodek. Before the StB and the police arrived, she wrote their address for me on a piece of paper. My wife and I then went to Brodek and we found them and they immediately went to Znojmo to pick up those four children, and so at least they did not have to be sent to some children’s home. And as I said a while ago, during those interrogations I already started feeling that the tension was diminishing. Those ‘besprechung’ - Milan Uhde was the one who made up this expression - when we were being summoned to interrogation by the StB, and then suddenly, after Gorbachev started his perestroika, when we came to the interrogation, the StB man offered me a cup of coffee. I refused, not because I would be afraid that it would be poisoned, but because I was quite taken aback by it. At first it didn’t occur to me, but when I thought about it, I thought: ‘Well, something is happening, they are not so sure anymore.’ And gradually it was loosening more and more, and I was even able to apply to work privately under the local administration committee. All of a sudden they also stopped jamming the Radio Free Europe so fiercely, and from time to time, something would appear in the newspapers as well.”