"I had one of the most dramatic moments, if you want to know so much, I don't know how many days it was [after the invasion], it was at the moment when tanks and armored vehicles drove through the streets and people stood with their backs to them demonstratively, and on this day, about the second or third after them entering the country, I was across the Bílá labuť shopping centre, my wife and I were there when a jeep suddenly came and started firing machine guns on the building of the Bolshevik publishing house Svoboda and they shot up the facade and we ran to a bookstore and there we waited for what would happen. And suddenly a terrible ruckus, a lot of that glass, we didn't know what was going on. I was imagining that exactly what was happening was what had happened in Hungary in the year ‘56 in Budapest, that I was not sure I would ever leave the bookstore ... After a while the shooting stopped, in the meantime an officer came in, we hid at the back behind the shelves, and he searched for the entrance to the building. Then it turned out that they had this building in their own hands from the very beginning… "
"I experienced one interesting episode with Vladimír Straka, but let's leave it aside now, it's more of a fiction ... Vladimír Straka was sentenced [to eight years] unlike Tomek, who, as is well known, got the rope; I remember that the day after, or a few days later, I had a meeting with the gentlemen in question, and one of them was extremely happy to tell me: Yes, the trial was over, that's it, it will be over! God bless! Vladivoj Tomek was convicted sometime in July of 1960, he pleaded for clemency, everything was in vain, he asked for the pardon of the president, no one answered, as is well known, he was executed, and the tragedy is still interesting in that to make it really thorough, the execution took place on November 17 at noon one thousand nine hundred and sixty. "
"How it went ... In my case, I was given a piece of paper and a pencil to write down what I just said. That I undertake to meet with the members, that I will perform under the name - choose a name! - I said no, I can't determine that, so they gave me the name Philosopher, so I wrote this, that I will use this name in contact with them, and that I will remain silent and I will not talk about anything anywhere, and this that I should write down. So I wrote down everything except the last sentence as I say, and in the last sentence I wrote: I was instructed that I would not and should not share my information about the matter, and I signed it. But I had no idea this was going to upset them. For another hour and a half, they argued with me that this was not the way to go, that it turned out that my attitudes towards the regime were not so correct when I emphasized that instruction was something I might not eventually follow and that I had to be far more accommodating.
The historian of theater and literature Václav Štěpán was born on January 21, 1935 in the village of Tišice in the Mělník region into an agricultural family which, despite small fields (5.5 hectares) was called “kulaks” at the time of collectivization. After high school, he was accepted to the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, where he studied history. Here he met the student Vladimír Straka, who at one party confided in him his participation in the anti-communist resistance group of Vladivoj Tomek. In 1952, the group committed an armed attack on four basic service soldiers, killing one of the soldiers. Tomek’s group was not discovered until several years later, and due to Straka’s statement, members of the StB also focused on Václav Štěpán, whom they contacted in the spring of 1960. Since he did not give Vladimír Straka, they threatened to judge him as a member of their “terrorist groups”. Václav Štěpán signed a cooperation with the StB under strong pressure. At that time he worked at the Military History Institute and since 1961 at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Academy of Sciences. Here he participated in the events of the Prague Spring. Around 1967, the State Security lost interest in him, stopped contacting him and terminated his cooperation with him. During the years of normalization, Václav Štěpán worked at the Institute of Scenography, at the Theater Institute and in the theater department of the National Museum. The StB contacted the witness again in the 1980s and interrogated him in connection with the anti-regime activities of his brother-in-law Rudolf Battek, but he did not agree to cooperate despite threats. Václav Štěpán is the author and co-author of many important publications on the history of Czech theater. He passed away on December, the 30th, 2023.
