"When the policeman came to our grammar school, the director arrived in the physics classroom, telling me, "Honzík, come here!" I immediately knew what was going on. I had a limp so the policeman told me: "Take that street to the station. I'll take another road to avoid attention." It was clear to him I could not run away. We arrived at the station where there already was a father of my class-mate and two members of the Gestapo. One of them distinguished themselves in Hamburg, fighting the Communists in the 1930s, the other was a German from the Sudetenland, originally a teacher from Jihlava. It was he who asked me whether I knew why I was being arrested. I replied that probably because of the journal we published at our school."
"At the faculty there was this situation that I was approached by many students asked whether I would sign their application for the Party membership. I asked: why do you want it still? This was no opportunism, people really respected the Party in the late 1960s! Professor Vodička, among others, who refused to join the Party in the 1950s and had problems in his career, joined in the late 1960s. Naturally, he knew he would benefit from it but it was no longer against his conscience. At that time the Party changed so that he could be a part of it. Then naturally in the 1968 [1969] he ended up badly. Some students had problems as they were excluded from the Party. It might have been easier for them had I not signed their application forms."
I never checked anyone myself, I was in a high position and I just received reports in the evening. I will tell you about the organisation... (But there must have been replies by those people.) They were by threes depending on their specialisation and colleagues were called to them to interview them. We, at the central committee, received a report in the evening, saying that of those fifteen people, twelve were checked, one was dubious and two were fired. We either agreed or asked them to investigate their decision further. I never spoke to anybody in person. But the problem was that colleagues investigated their colleagues and there was the issue of sympathies in that too. It could be a serious issue with the girls and things like that. I remeber I was present at the party check of one comrade and I wanted her to be granted the three-month defferal, because I didn't like her."
“A classmate of mine was imprisoned in the same corridor in Dresden. He was the older brother of the historian Kaplan. We couldn’t talk together but we saw each other each day in front of the cells. Before Christmas they brought in Bohuslav Bárta, the leader of our student group, he was supposed to attend his trial. And I could talk to him. Till the end of the war they said. Rubbish! Kaplan was sharing his cell with a German whose trial took place in the evening. And in the morning he knocks on my door and says: “Your partner got the axe”. And he was transferred to another cell. So at least I saw Bonďa Bárta because we hadn’t thought about that – that they would give out death penalties. And in autumn this still wouldn’t have resulted in death penalty.”
“After a month we were transferred by train under the supervision of Schutzpolizei, and they were quite liberal, they took us to Bohušovice through Prague. There we spent about two hours on a side track at the Wilson Station. Because it was known that this transport would happen, there was this guy named Vadas – a business owner from Pardubice who also was imprisoned – since it was a normal train car connected to a normal train, he bribed the “schutzpolicemen” so each of us got a chicken thigh to eat, here in Prague.”
Jiří Honzík was born on 19th April 1924 in Košumberk. Even as a fourteen-year-old boy he became interested in politics and literature. During high school in Vysoké Mýto he entered an association of left-wing oriented students in 1941. It presented itself as a literature club, unrelated to politics, but in reality it was an illegal communist group called Mladá garda („Young Guard“). Jiří became leader of the so-called city organization and his tasks included spreading leaflets and other printed materials. A year later the group was reported by an undercover agent and the seventeen-year-old Jiří and his friends ended up in prison under the pretext of promoting the Rudé Právo newspaper. He was in prison cells in Pardubice, Terezín, and Dresden. Unlike his friends who were executed he, as a minor, was only sentenced to a year and returned home alive and well. After the war he studied at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University and became an important expert in Czech and Russian studies. He spent several years as a professor at the university, he wrote and translated many books and put together several poetry anthologies. He had to leave the academic field in 1972 during the so-called reorganization of Russian studies research facilities. Today‘s students still learn from his publications and read his translations of classic Russian texts. Jiří is still dedicated to his lifelong passion - poetry - both as a literary scientist and a poet. Jiří Honzík passed away on March, the 12th, 2018.
