Vladimír Stehlík

* 1934

  • “I was looking where to get hold of uranium, since I carried it in boxes around the Barbora mine. I selected about ten kilos of high quality uranium and as I could not get it over the gatehouse, I threw it over the triple barbed wire fence, because at that time the Svatopluk camp no longer existed but shafts were still guarded from the towers. If I had been spotted by a soldier with the machine gun on the tower, he could have shot me down. So I threw it over the triple barbed wire fence, always near one particular bush. Later I collected about five kilo of uranium which I took to Brno.”

  • “I went to cinema, Alfa arcade. When I walked out, I met Ladislav Herán. He was young but was an anti-communist. I didn’t know it at that time but he was already followed by the Secret Police. We made plans to form a resistance group, we met several times. We wanted to get hold of some weapons. He claimed that there were some squirrel rifles at his father’s friend’s cottage. So we decided to go there, open the cottage and take the rifles.”

  • “In the first interrogation I can’t say that they beat me too much, but as soon as they found out that I had lied or denied something, they hit me so hard that I fell from my chair. They were quite rough. When I was sentenced, they put me in Cejl. There was this warden, smallish, quite fat. We were allowed to take one shower a week. First the water was cold. When we put on soap, he switched the water to very hot so we would have got scalded. So we had to wipe our bodies and return to our cells. It was very hard there.”

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    Brno, 23.10.2017

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    Brno, 24.10.2017

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It was hard but I have survived

Vladimír Stehlík, okolo roku 1956
Vladimír Stehlík, okolo roku 1956
photo: archiv pamětníka

Vladimír Stehlík was born on March 23, 1934, in Brno. In 1953 he was expelled from Chemical-Technological University in Pardubice, reason being his disapproval of the communist regime. He returned to Brno and found a job as a turner. With his friends, they established a resistance group and their ambition was to fight communism. They stole a car, a motorcycle and tried to get hold of some weapons. Eventually he was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison for subversion of the regime. He assembled radios so that he could listen to channels in Western countries. In 1956 he was about to set on fire the Brno-based jammer of Radio Free Europe. Shortly before the act he was arrested again as some of his friends were informers of the Secret Police. He was sentenced to uranium mines, where he laboured until 1961. He then joined Brno Paperworks as a labourer. In 1968 he was active in the Prague Spring process, became a member of the Czechoslovak Socialist Party and believed that democratic changes in society would take place. The Soviet invasion of the country in 1968 was a major disappointment for him. Secretly he met people who were persecuted during the normalisation period. In 1989 he was one of the founders of the Civic Forum in Brno. In the early 1990s he was elected a mayor of the municipal part Brno 4.