Vladimír Hahn

* 1946

  • "I was in the Civic Forum. When it came to demonstrating in the street, I said, 'No such thing as someone deciding and going.' I said, 'Anyone who wants things to change here, who wants to go to the square, they take a time card and get the leader to sign that they're off for personal reasons. You're all going to have a nice time and that way nobody can accuse you of doing something you shouldn't have done. Nobody knows how it will turn out.'"

  • "My father said there was also a file on Milada Horáková at the Pilsen Regional Court. My father was its chairman. In the 1950s, the court received files from the police, and there was also a court decision to execute or imprison her for ten or fifteen years. There was a verdict prepared. My father, when they brought it to his desk, looked at it and said: 'This is impossible, we are supposed to get a police investigation and here is the written sentence with the amount of punishment. I can't sign that.'"

  • "Mostly there were problems with property. My uncle Josef had a corner shop and a coffee roasting plant in Přemyslova Street, one of the first in Pilsen. In 1918 he got a paper that he was exempted from military service forever. After 1948, the communists wanted to confiscate everything, his house, his shop. They ended up taking away his paper saying he was exempt from military service. My father started to make arrangements, but they came for my uncle at night, at four in the morning. They took him to the PTP (Auxilliary Technical Battalions), at the age of fifty-two, to the uranium mines."

  • "I remember a lot of things from Žlutice, even though we lost the farm when I was only two and a half years old. When the communists came with a notice that they were confiscating the property, my grandfather had a heart attack and died. He was over sixty years old and had worked there all his life. His eldest son, an agricultural engineer, was to continue there. After 1948 he fled to America."

  • "My father was good at it. When a comrade came to him sometime in 1949 or 1950 carrying a paper saying they wanted a tenement, my father looked at it and said, 'Well, you're writing here according to the decree. But according to what law?' They didn't have any support in the law, they hadn't made them yet. In the end we kept the house, nobody came, nobody took it from us after that."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Plzeň, 08.02.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:54:38
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

To my father, justice was above all else.

Vladimír Hahn in 2023
Vladimír Hahn in 2023
zdroj: Pilsen studio

Vladimír Hahn was born on 26 March 1946 in Pilsen. His father Ladislav‘s family lived in Pilsen for centuries, his mother Jarmila grew up on a farm in Žlutice near Karlovy Vary. The communist regime confiscated the farm, which they had been paying off for years. The witness‘s grandfather František Diviš could not bear it and died of a heart attack. His uncle Jaromír Diviš, who was to inherit the farm, emigrated to the United States. When he returned to Czechoslovakia in 1956, State Security had him committed to a psychiatric ward on suspicion of being a spy. My father‘s family lost their colonial and coffee roasting plant in Pilsen after 1948. His uncle Josef, who ran the shop, was conscripted into the Auxiliary Technical Battalion (PTP). His father‘s family was left with a tenement house with three apartments in Pilsen, where he grew up. His father Ladislav worked as a judge in Liberec, Žlutice and Pilsen. In the 1950s, he refused to sign pre-prepared judgments, and was not allowed to practice criminal law. He was rehabilitated in 1968. Vladimír Hahn worked all his life in the Plzeň Škoda plant, a machine tool factory. In 1979, the company sent him to India, to a newly built factory in Ranchi. He welcomed 1989 as „a great satisfaction“ after what his family had endured under the communist regime.