Miroslav Svoboda

* 1962

  • "We didn't go to any diagnostic camp, we went normally to [today's English] Embankment to the Regional Administration [State Security], which was newly built at the time. There they put us in that auditorium... I don't know what it looks like today, I haven't been there for a long time, but back then it was very ugly and gloomy. There were these huge Russian leatherette seats, dark marble, a bronze Dzerzhinsky on the wall with this slogan '[cool head], flaming heart, clean hands' and something else, just one lie after another. And they put us in this one, and now somewhere up on that fifth floor they were probably conferring [about] what to do with us, because they had nowhere to put the kids. Into the diagnostic, I guess they thought that was too much, I don't know... Well, and those boys, as we sat there after those strange experiences with the cops before and now, [as] they put us in that shit there, they were so weepy and they couldn't take it well..."

  • ""We all tried to get the blue [booklet]. Most of my friends did it by pretending to be 'mentally ill,' as that was the easiest to fake. And I don’t know why, maybe out of some masochistic reason, I decided that since everyone was doing it that way, I would come up with something different. I'm just not gonna do what everybody else is doing. And my friend and I came up with duodenal ulcer disease, which is a disease that's there for a while and not there for a while. Just because you can't see something right there on the x-ray doesn't mean you don't have it. It's there in the spring and it's not there in the fall. It's kind of intermittent. And this character just seemed like a good one for that purpose. When I told them, I knew I was going to go in for an x-ray the next day. So my friend Stephen and I figured I should eat a lentil. We figured out how long before the x-ray that it would be in that duodenum and not somewhere else. About four hours before or something. So I got up that night four or five hours before - I was still living at my parents' house at the time - and I went into the kitchen and said I'm going to take one lentil, wash it down with water and go back to sleep. Well, I didn't find the lentil, it just wasn't there in the pantry. So I thought, 'What now?' Now my world was almost falling apart. I thought, 'The whole structure's falling down because there's no lentils...' So then I found some beans. But the beans were bigger than the lentils. I thought, I guess it's better this way than nothing. So I swallowed the bean, washed it down and went to sleep. Then the next day I was there describing the symptoms I had studied."

  • "For example, I remember that somewhere in that elementary school a pioneer organization was being formed, so we were introduced to some two young people, husbands, that they would be our leaders. These two young people took us to their apartment in a block of flats near the school. And I don't know how old I might have been, some second or third grade... I don't remember how old I was when I joined Pioneer. But I remember that they just took us into the living room and they really had busts of Lenin and pictures like that on the living room wall, which was not common anymore. I already knew that at that time. It wasn't usual to have such decorations and such artifacts in the living room. I know that because of this I acquired such an aversion to it that I even resisted the very mild, I must say, pressure from my parents not to go out and sort of go there. So I was like, 'No, I'm just not going to come here because these people are really weird.'"

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    Plzeň, 15.11.2018

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    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
  • 2

    Plzeň, 08.02.2024

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    duration: 03:07:56
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
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I went straight to work as a stoker so that the Bolsheviks couldn’t nag me

Miroslav Svoboda in 1976
Miroslav Svoboda in 1976
photo: Archive of the witness

Miroslav Svoboda was born on 6 September 1962 in Hořice to Bohumila Svobodová, née Amanova, and Miroslav Karl Schmied, who lived in Pilsen. His father worked as a researcher at the University of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in Pilsen, his mother taught mathematics and art at the primary school. After the war, the Red Army soldiers stayed with his grandparents in Nový Bydžov for a short time. Miroslav Svoboda started his schooling in Nový Bydžov in 1968 because of the August occupation, and continued in Pilsen. While studying at the secondary industrial school in Pilsen, he embraced the Christian faith. After his marriage to Libuše Táborská in 1981, the couple had sons Štěpán, Josef and František. He worked as an orderly in the University Hospital in Pilsen, a heating engineer in the Continental Hotel and in the blacksmith’s shop in Stráž, a lighting engineer in the Chamber Theatre and a pumper in the Vodní zdroje company. After five years of pretending to have a duodenal ulcer, he received a blue book. He ran a small home samizdat publishing house, copying a number of samizdat titles. The day before 28 October 1989, he was arrested with his young sons by State Security officers and interrogated, then continued to be followed. In 1989 he became the founder of the Civic Forum Pilsen and the Christian Democratic Party. In the 1990s he founded the civic association Exodus with Petr Žižka and later the unique website Scriptum. He studied theology and social work. At the time of filming (2024) he lived in Pilsen.