“The director merely greeted and said that he was giving the microphone to the chairman of the communist party-wide committee and the chairman of the Revolutionary Trade Union Movement (ROH). Comrade Bohumil Jindrák took the floor and said: 'We will not subvert socialism! We will not join any general strike. The Antonín Zápotocký Mine will normally work.‘ Then he gave the floor to Jan Sábel, the chairman of the trade unions, a later ODS member, and the chairman of the nationwide mining union. He announced that the plant committee of ROH decided that the Antonín Zápotocký mine would not register for the strike. And then he made a mistake because he said if anyone wanted to ask a question. I raised my hand, not saying what I intended to say, but I went forward, reached for my microphone, and he handed it to me. I stood on the podium, and into the microphone I said that the general strike at the mine Antonín Zápotocký had just begun. Jindra cried out, 'Who are you talking for?' I said for all those who now applaud, and once I clapped my hands. I knew from the theatee that it was a trigger. Once someone applauds, others usually join. And everyone applauded. The general strike started.”
“In 1977, I was approached in the mine by the chairman of the communist workshop organization, Stajgr, Mr. Komínek, who told me that I was a clever son, that I had the greatest number of innovators in the whole factory and that such people are much need. I said I did not know if I could enter because I had already entered once, on August 21, 1968, and that I had my registration pass at home. He said: 'It is not possible, you have to explain it!' And he invited me to the Communist Party meeting. In about three days I came to the meeting, Kominek introduced me as a new candidate, but said that it was so strange and that I would explain it to them. And he gave me a word. I never told him I wanted to join the party. But I used the opportunity. I had a copy of Rudé právo with me, where the then Prime Minister Lubomír Štrougal was quoted, who said that normalization was over, our life was normalized and socialism was flourishing. I told the comrades that I would like to ask when the Soviet troops will leave, now the normalization is over. And there was a rumble. Komínek jumped up, the chairman took the floor. But there was a call among the people to let me talk and say when the soldiers would leave. I was banished from the meeting. When I came to work the next day, my hydraulic supervisor told me he was ordered not to employ me anymore.”
“Although it may sound strange, I enjoyed the job. I enjoyed looking for the prints of prehistoric creatures that, at a depth of seven hundred, eight hundred meters, can be found on the stone waste, because down in a certain layer the coal is compressed by sandstone. But what is coal? Fossilized horsetails and lizards. Sometimes it happened to us that the lizard's trunk came down in the form of a stone cylinder from the ceiling. Suddenly, there stood a stone tree millions of years old. It was beautiful. I enjoyed looking around and collecting prints of various trilobites. When I started to do the work of walking down the shaft and getting into old, abandoned old corridors, for example, I suddenly saw various molds on the ceiling and walls of the mine lamp, but the molds were coloured. The water leaking was stained with minerals somewhere red, orange, yellow, and pale blue songs. It created wonderful paintings. No one ever imagined that there is such beauty in the underground.”
Ladislav Vrchovský was born on 25 June 1948 in České Budějovice. His father Karel Vrchovský fought in World War I and remained in the army after the war. After February 1948 he was released from civil service. Ladislav grew up in poor conditions in the village of Janišov near Vsetín. Because he was not admitted to study chemistry in the then Gottwaldov, he enrolled at the mining secondary vocational school in Havířov. Shortly before leaving school he had to leave school with a vocational certificate. He invaded the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 at the army service in Prachatice, where he expressed his opposition to the occupation. For twenty years he worked in blue-collar professions in the mine of Antonín Zápotocký in Orlová. He devoted himself to amateur theatre and held unofficial exhibitions of artists. He was interrogated repeatedly by the State Security, registered as a closely observed person. In November 1989 he led a strike committee in the Ostrava-Karviná Mines (OKD). From 1990 to 1992, he was a Member of the House of People in the Federal Assembly for the Civic Forum. After leaving politics he made a living as a journalist, publicist, and theatre critic. He is a member of the Green Party. He described life under communism in his autobiographical novel From Underground to the Sun. He lives in Ostrava.
