Břetislav Jeník

"Long before the Russians came; I already had my leaving permit for vacation in Yugoslavia." It must have been very difficult back then... "It wasn’t difficult. That’s the thing. I came to the police station on Leninova Street, the passport department and told them: ´I need a passport so I can go to Yugoslavia on my vacation.´ and when I entered the office some girl was sitting there. Her name was Jarka Dočekalová, she was also from Kunštát like me. She was a real communist. And as I saw her there I thought: Good bye my passport! But she said: ´Hi, Břetislav! You want to travel abroad right? And I said: ´Well, yeah.´ ´Yes, I know, hmmm.´ She gave me the passport basically immediately. She was the red guards, big communist. She was very active during the February 1968 and afterwards she started to work in the police office. So that’s how I got my passport. We packed our things and because we couldn’t go through Hungary, we drove to Austria and stayed in Vienna. From there we went to Arsenal where the refugee camp was. We waited there."

"After they released me from the jail I stayed with my father for a while. But it was quite crowded there. Then I lived with my cousin too and later I got married and we got ourselves an apartment here in Černé Pole location. I began to work. I started first as...I tried to work in geological research where I could use my experiences from uranium mines. I didn’t like it there, so I went to...In Leopoldov prison I learnt to be a bricklayer and so I got a job as a bricklayer in the Construction Company in Brno. I learnt how to lay the teraso tiles. So that’s what I was doing and what I was good at. I was also able to make good money at it. Not with the salary, but through the extra hours. I used to have a salary as low as 1500 - 1600 Czech crowns per month which was the usual carpenter’s salary. And it was rather over an average salary because the average salary in Czechoslovakia was around 1200 Czech crowns. And I was able to make as much as 3000 CZK during one weekend - Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I found out later that the construction companies were not able to satisfy all customers and people were building houses and needed carpenters for that - making the stairways or the floors inside etc. At the same time as I was working, I began to attend night school and later I was able to finish high school. After that I wanted to continue at the University, but they wouldn’t let me in. "And that was what year?" I think it was somewhere in 1966. But my bosses just laughed at me and told me: ´What were you thinking? With your personal report looking like this?!´ By using a fiddle I managed to get at least into the High Tech College. That’s what my prison-mates taught me. The officials found out about it in about a year and they couldn’t understand how I managed to be accepted. Faking my birth certificate! There were no computers back then, all they had was the negative records, which means, that they only had a record about people who committed a crime already. So when you faked the date of your birth - all you needed to do was to change one number - they got an empty record on you then. And that’s how I got to the Technical College. All of my education is from the time before we left to Australia. In fact, I attended also one Technical school in New Zealand...But I wasn’t able to get into the University though. Back then, when they found out about how I got to the college, they (the communist officials) asked me in and told me: ´Look, pal, it’s the tradesmen who always go up. No matter what you do, you always find the tradesman there...right? ´ "So they basically saw the bourgeois element in you?" Yes, I was, but I...they didn’t like that...Of course, they didn’t understand it, didn’t understand the society, how it works etc. People with the initiative always get where they wanted, in every kind of political system. My father was full of initiative and he acquired a book shop. So they let me finish the school after all. But they didn’t have any work for me according to my qualifications therefore when I found myself a job with the agriculture constructions, I must have been dismissed, because they didn’t have any work for me. The Agricultural Construction company hired me immediately as a foreman, but within a month I was already a builder. That was my last job in Czechoslovakia, the builder."

You were 16. Were you interested in politics at all or have you entered any party...? "I wasn’t interested in politics at all. I’ve hade no political ambitions. If there were any I was more left - oriented, because that’s what you get when you are involved with books. All the culture influences were always left - oriented, even during the First republic period. From the time of the Emperor, basically. The left trends began somewhere at the end of the 19th century. Therefore my opinions were slightly left-oriented in general. For an example, when I was in jail I met a group of Socialists there. My sympathies were all for the National Socialist Party. The people were former farmers of course, they were...well not all of them were farmers, but when the communists didn’t allow the emergence of the Republican Party, because they sensed the danger for them there, the farmers entered the National Party. The party leaderships of both parties made an agreement and together they established the biggest and the strongest party." - Arrival of the army - you lived in Brno then? "We used to have a cottage at the Brno Dam. And when the front approached, we decided that it would be too dangerous in the town so we decided to move to our cottage in the valley by the river. There we would be just fine. We would wait there until the front would be gone and then we would return to the town again. But what happened in reality was that the German army didn’t defend Brno at all, the Russian army just passed through the town without fighting and continued further until they finally stopped - very close to our cottage. We were in nobody’s land. Over the river in front of us, there was the Russian army and behind our cottage in the woods were the Germans. They were firing at each other with us in between. We were hiding inside the cottage. They knew about us, so they didn’t fire at the cottages. That’s how we survived there. We were fine for about eight days before the artillery started to fire on us. Some of the cottages got hit. Inside of the neighbor cottage old lady died and her son was injured. We didn’t wait any longer then; we packed our stuff quickly and ran away to the Highland Mountains. We arrived in some tiny village, and where the road ended, you couldn’t go any further. And there lived one local farmer who let us stay with him for few days. Later the Romanian army arrived. We have immediately...We were quite...We heard about what the Russians were doing in Brno - robbery, rape. Later on I verified everything after we got back to our normal life. I mentioned this Dr. Weitberg, who was the senior consultant at the u Miosrdných hospital. It was the second largest hospital in Brno. I was there when he told my father that there were seven hundred women who needed treatment after the Russians arrived. However the Russians from the WWI were not known for rape. Of course there were cases like this, but you would fine these in every army. But this time it was a wave influenced by the moral decay, which was brought with the communist regime. It was a total moral decay. In prison I met people who were in Russia or fought in the Russian army - it was the Czechoslovak army in fact. It was the army led by colonel Svoboda which fought in Russia, and these people were talking very plainly: ´The have recruited these Kalmyk people from the wilderness into the army and told them: just go there and whatever you can steel it’s yours.´ They fought for...the whole Russian nation refused to fight for the socialistic ideas or for the communism and that’s why it was...In Australia I met one taxi driver, his name was Walter Litinsky. He got to Germany during the Russian occupation. He used to say: ´When the Germans arrived, we welcomed them as heroes and six months later I was back in the woods behind the mountains.´"

"Creating the leaflets and drawing the motto was the hardest part. I was pulling the flags down, yes; we made shorts out of it. The new police headquarters had been built at that time which was later known as the StB building. It was located on the Lenin Street. That’s where I pulled the red flag down; I cut it off the pole. When I had a few of the flags I gave them to some man who used them for making shorts. Of course they (police) never found out about this. They only knew about the leaflets and the mottos. "Have you ever regretted that?" What? "Performing these rascality’s, especially those that have influenced your life for the next ten years" The only thing I regret is that I didn’t leave right away. Real it was...it was just nonsense, really just the monkey business. And at that time I had no idea about it, but my father was already taking steps necessary for our family to leave to the West. He was talking about Venezuela - thank God it didn’t happen, it would have been a disaster! But he already had plans for us, for our whole family. I basically spoiled his plans by going to jail. My uncle told me afterwards: ´Why you didn’t tell us anything boys, we could have arrange the escape for all of you.´ It wasn’t any problem in the past. You could cross the border line in Moravia and then go to Vienna from here and further to the American zone and that was it."