Ing. Milan Uhlíř

"It was so complicated. When I was there, there were several elections. I know that at least once I was at the elections and that I considered a lot whether I should go or not. I thought, I teach, I go to church, they've got some problems because of me and the election isn't going to change anything anyway, so I was at the election. Then, as things moved on, I didn't. I remember they were with us with the box and they were begging us to throw the ballot in there because they were also somehow evaluated by these national committee chairmen or whoever was underneath, and they were having problems because of that when they weren't all at the polls. But that was back when I wasn't teaching and I thought, "This is too much for me and I'm not going."

“Those who remained there then came to me and to other teachers and they said that it was terrible, that those boys would be sent to a prison or to a labour camp in Vietnam and that they would probably die there and that everything was now over for them. They asked us whether we would not be able to help them somehow. There were more of us teachers who were willing to help and we knew that principal Škoda had provoked them and that he had been biased against them. About twenty of us gathered there and we agreed that we would write a letter to the Vietnam embassy in Prague and that we would state our view of the situation so that there would not be only the explanation given by principal Škoda. It was a spontaneous, adventurous act. At night we went to the Vietnam embassy in Prague and we met in some apartment. He confirmed everything for us. We asked whether we could help in any way and if it made any sense to write something. He said that it would certainly help. We thus wrote a letter. We did not write that they were innocent, but we wrote that the principal had provoked them and that it was not only them who were to blame. Then we sent the letter to the embassy.”

“I was not present there, but the fact is that principal Škoda did not like them, and some other teachers did not like them, either. For example, during meetings he spoke of them as black mouths. He commonly used words like this. The students did not want to complain about him, but they knew that he did not like them. I was not present when it happened that day, and for twenty years I did not think about it and I forgot about it, and I remembered it only as we talked about it together. Škoda’s version of the incident was that he came to the residence hall and they had a mess there. He told them to clean it up, but they were drunk or misbehaved and he said that they threw a blanket over him and they gave him a beating and that he managed to run away and call the police. The Vietnamese students came with a different story. I don’t know if their version was more trustworthy, but allegedly the principal came in there, he got angry and he yelled and he started choking one of the younger students. The others came to his defence and they were pushing against principal Škoda and he got awfully angry and he threatened to call the police. Then he left and he really called the police. At that time, I was doing an extra course for teachers in Brno and therefore I was not there during that weekend. The same day, or the day after, a bus full of policemen with dogs arrived there and they surrounded the whole vocational school. People who lived there later told me about it. Then they selected about five boys or more, whom Škoda pointed out as attackers, and they handcuffed them and took them away in the bus.”

“We were attending churches everywhere in the vicinity, and then our daughter Markéta was born and she was going with us. With a child and a baby pram we were quite conspicuous, because there were not many people like us there. All the people saw us everywhere. Principal Škoda was reprimanded because one of his teachers was going to church, and I don’t know if he was even penalized for that or not. He called me to his office and he asked me whether I could stop going to church. I told him that I could not, and that I had warned him before and that he had told me at that time that it was not a problem for him. He replied that it was not a problem for him, but that he had thought that once we had the baby, we would no longer have time for that and that he was now in big trouble because of that. I told him that I was sorry, but that I was not able to change anything about it.”