Miloš Voráč

* 1959

  • "When they took me away again after the house search, they said to me, 'Mr. Voráček, do you have any objections to the search or to our behaviour?'' I say, 'Why do you ask?' And they say, 'We wanted to know if you're going to complain to Ivan Medek in Vienna again,' because I had called there before for other reasons, 'so that it wouldn't appear on the seditious radios.' So I left it without comment, but it was interesting, because in earlier years they probably wouldn't have even asked like that."

  • "At that time, samizdat was already being copied, typed, and multiplied in a relatively large number, and I couldn't manage to copy the individual titles myself, which I also tried to do, but it was a really big time-sucker and it required more or less copying skills, and I was looking for someone to take on each of these projects and to copy it. Specifically it was the Havel´s Protocols, and I mentioned to a friend of mine once that I was having trouble and not keeping up with the copying, if he knew of anyone who... But the friend was at the military service at the time. So I thought it would be more of a laughing matter and he would send me somewhere, but he didn't, he said, 'I'll take it to the army,' because he was just on leave, 'and I'll arrange it there.' I said, 'Wait, but at the military service, how are you going to do it?' He said, 'Leave it to me, I have a friend there and he will take care of it.' And that friend was private Jiří Rys, who was the typist of the chief of the western military district in Tábor. I mean, some general staff, I don't know if I'm saying it exactly, and this private Jiří Rys in the general staff building gradually typed the whole of the Havel´s Protocols."

  • "I was finishing primary school in '74, and in that atmosphere and in that environment there was a guidance counsellor for further studies who told me that if we hadn't changed our minds for years, by which she meant religion, that all those A's were useless and that I should look for some kind of apprenticeship. The other brothers weren't affected that way because one was four years earlier and it wasn't so insistent, and second one was six years later and it wasn't so insistent either. But in the first half of the seventies, I would say that this supervision to punish all those who were in some way so-called guilty was the most cruel. And again, you don't negotiate with the Bolshevik bunch, i.e. when they offered me the apprenticeship, my father said, 'You're going to the apprenticeship.'"

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    Brno, 19.03.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 02:13:24
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - JMK REG ED
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Believing that what we do is meaningful

Miloš Voráč, historical photo
Miloš Voráč, historical photo
photo: Witness´s archive

Miloš Voráč was born on 11 June 1959 in Brno, but his parents, both deeply religious Catholics, lived in Adamov. His father, František Voráč, had to go through military service in the Auxiliary Engineering Corps in the 1950s because of his faith. After primary school, for ideological reasons, he was not allowed to study at secondary school and entered a bricklayer’s apprenticeship. After a year, he managed to transfer to secondary construction technical school in Brno, where he successfully graduated in 1979. After a semestre of study at the Brno University of Technology and a short time working as a stagehand in the theatre, he finally graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Brno in the 1980s with a degree in Czech language - history. After graduation he worked as a guide at the Měnínská Gate. Already during his studies at the Faculty of Philosophy he was active in the environment of unofficial culture and participated in the spreading of samizdat literature. Because of this, he had several problems with the Statet Security in the form of interrogations and searches. In 1989 he signed the petition Several Sentences. After several years of teaching in secondary schools, he worked since the mid-1990s as an editor for various publishers, most notably for Druhé město. He has been editing mostly Czech fiction. In 2024 Miloš Voráč was living in Brno.