“There were archives in every company I guess, but there were special ones in Tesla Rožnov. Especially the Communist Party archive and the archive of the human resources. And other archives too. Of the people’s militia, probably. Those archives must have been enormously large. They were taken out shortly after the revolution, when it was clear that… When Havel was elected president and things started moving fast and they seemed to appear increasingly irreversible, that’s when a mass event was organized, archives were cleared, and documents were taken to the Tesla Elektron resort. It was near Rožnov, on the borderline between Dolní Bečva and Prostřední Bečva rivers. And it was taken to the boiler room there to be burnt.”
“Back then, although I don’t know how it worked in other companies, but in Tesla Rožnov it was common that bosses kept files on their employees. And when I started working under Malík, it was the famous Black book. Everyone knew that Malík had a Black book and that it was a book where he kept information and critical views of his employees. And that he had many informers spread out. Many people writing all kinds of things in the book. To be more specific, when I was working under Malík, some Hasalík, an engineer, was one of the informers. Coincidentally, we became friends and I had a hard time trying to prepare him for college. I tutored him in math. Then he graduated from a college and started worked there as an economist. But he worked for the other side. –Where did these people get such information? They just pretended to be your friends and then informed on you? – We were friends and everything, we shook hands, patted each other on the shoulder like best friends. But they. The kind of information they had, for example, was that I told some political jokes. But everyone knew, you know, everyone knew I was the only technician in the unit who had not joined the Party, that I was against the regime. So I was kind of an easy target.”
“When it was the third year of the parade, there were already ten or twelve of us. And we were interested in and talked about the parade and its content. Every year we tried to boost it with some themes and topics. And it happened in January, while we were traveling, we were cross-country skiing across Javorníky mountain ranges. And then we got on a train, I think it was either in Karolínka or in Nový Hrozenkov, probably in Nový Hrozenkov. And on the way back to Vsetín, in that crowded train, we talked. Us four cross-country skiers talked about the May Day parade. There was a twenty-year-old girl sitting next to us. A beautiful young lady. And she was listening to us with one ear while studying. She was a college student. And about halfway to Vsetín, she approached us and asked: ‘What are you talking about? That’s pretty interesting! What is that parade?’ And we explained it to her. We told her about the parade and why we do it. And everyone around listened to it. But she reacted directly. She said: ‘Well, and if I went with you, would you take me in?’ And we said: ‘Sure, why not. Give us your address and we’ll call you before the parade.’ And so on. Well, several months had passed and we had almost forgotten it. But couple days prior to the march someone remembered that we had this girl’s address somewhere. And we thought: ‘Okay, so we’ll write her and let her know.’ So we told her like one week prior to the march. We wrote her where and when we would meet, and that if she was interested, she should come. And to our great surprise, when we met at Krhová on our regular assembly point, we saw a girl with a huge bag pack waiting for us. And it was really that girl.”
Stanislav Zábranský was born May 4, 1951 in Polešovice in the Uherské Hradiště district. His mother Anna came from a big and very religious Catholic family. The beliefs and values, non-compliant with the ruling Communist regime, soon left an impression on small Stanislav as well. However, his father had joined the Communist Party in 1945 already. His parents arrived at a fundamental discrepancy when Stanislav was supposed to start attending religion classes at school, which required both of his parents’ approval; his father refused to sign it. At the age of ten, Stanislav already started to realize how unfree the regime was. When he wanted to go study his dream construction after completing primary school, he only got a recommendation for a technical high school in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm. That’s where he witnessed the Soviet occupation in the late 1960s. Stanislav swore he would never collaborate with the regime. He didn’t join the Czechoslovak Socialist Union of Youth, nor the Party itself, despite the fact that it meant he couldn’t study at a university. He refused to join the Czechoslovak Socialist Union of Youth even while in the military, where he was the only one from his rank to hand in a blank paper instead of a complete application. As punishment, he was reassigned to another unit in Kostelec nad Orlicí. After his return to civilian life, he started working in the Tesla Rožnov company. There he was once again experiencing pressure to join the Party, as well as bullying from his supervisor who kept a file on him. Even his co-workers informed on him. He befriended Bohumil Rapant, a priest that never finished his studies, and together they came out with alternative May Day parades in support of Charter 77 signatories. He had to explain his presence at those parades to his supervisors. When he signed the ‘Několik vět’ petition in 1989, he was called in for questioning by the State Security, where they threatened him that his daughter wouldn’t be able to continue her studies. Soon after, he got fired from Tesla, a decision supported by most of the employees of the company. Stanislav had no choice but to apply for a job in the Ostrava mines. Luckily, the Velvet Revolution came just in time. Stanislav immediately became involved in the public affairs, co-founded the Civic Forum branch in Rožnov and later acted as a local representative for the Christian democratic party. Over time, it bothered him more and more how easily the old structures were seeping through the new structures, and how people who had been in charge before the revolution again stood at the helm. Because of that, he left politics and returned to civilian life.
