Ing. Jiří Kubík

* 1941

  • "Because I think there were dead people there. Careful, I don't know exactly now, but I know that one was lying in blood. That's right. The guys had been fighting. The police weren't there at the time, so they just stabbed him in the neck and blood... Nobody noticed him, there were prisoners... I flew immediately to the warden to get an ambulance. So they took him away and then he was quite normal, but he was under oxygen for a long time. And the headmaster - when a crazy prisoner there hit me in the ear, he wanted to kill me because those are fatal wounds, that's what the police told me, and that's why I can't hear properly to this day - so he said that he's really going to report it to the ministry now, if there are any more severe cases like that. I heard that there were also dead guys getting beaten up." - "And why did the prisoner attack you? Or what was going on there?" - "Because he was angry that I was a witness. He said to me, 'Kubik, I'm going to kill you,' but I didn't take it seriously from him at all. And then all of a sudden he came at me, and if I hadn't fought back, it was fine, but he got even angrier. And those are the death blows, right there on the ear with the palm of his hand. So I just [heard] the ringing, and after a while it got even and even."

  • "A lieutenant was receiving us. I kept smiling stupidly, but not that I laughed at her. And she saw that I wasn't taking it seriously somehow, and she said and looked mostly at me, because there were several of us, the prisoners. They were the other ones - mostly thieves and those. She said, and this is unforgettable, 'You won't like anything in our constitution. If you happen to like anything, it's proof of our bad police work.' And I stopped smiling. Because there, when you turned on the water and wanted to drink, it was contaminated. When you went to bathe, there was shit around you, so it wasn't.... I guess it was ordered from somewhere for us to enjoy it, like she said. If we wanted to eat something else besides that or [drink] tea, you'd shit yourself and that was it. But I got so used to it that it didn't bother me at all."

  • "The prosecutor, when he arrested me, said, 'Well, look. Do you want to continue or don't you want to continue? If you keep talking, I'm going to arrest you, and if you say you're going to quit, I'm going to let you go.' He said it more solemnly than I did. Well, I said, 'Of course, Mr. Prosecutor, I'll keep on preaching.'"

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    Ústí nad Labem, 02.05.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 58:11
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - Ústecký kraj
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In court, I told the prosecutor that I would still preach after I was released.

The witness as a young boy, around the turn of the 50s and 60s
The witness as a young boy, around the turn of the 50s and 60s
zdroj: Archive of the witness

Jiří Kubík was born on 10 November 1941 in Prague as the older of two sons. A year after his birth, the family moved to Ostrava, where his father began working as a chemist. After the end of World War II, his parents got a large apartment in Ústí nad Labem, where they moved as new settlers of the border region. Here, the witness‘s father continued his profession, this time in a chemist‘s shop in Ústí nad Labem. Jiří Kubík attended elementary school there and then entered the secondary industrial school, which he finished with a high school diploma. On the recommendation of his father, he began to study inorganic chemistry and in 1964 he graduated as an engineer. Immediately afterwards, he started working as a chemist in a chemical plant in Ústí nad Labem, where he worked until 1981. It was there that he first became acquainted with the teachings of the Jehovah‘s Witnesses around 1966 and decided to expand the ranks of this community. He regularly attended secret meetings held in private apartments and devoted himself to missionary and preaching activities. From 1983 onwards he was actively monitored by State Security in the framework of the „Postman“ action and was subsequently arrested in April of that year and transferred to the detention centre in Litoměřice. After several interrogations, he was finally sentenced by the Regional Court in Ústí nad Labem to thirteen months without parole. He served his sentence in Correctional Education Group I in Oráčov Prison. There he had to work regularly with other convicts on the construction of the railway line between Rakovník and Louny. After serving his sentence, he remained under the supervision of State Security Service, but despite this, he devoted himself fully to his preaching activities. After the Velvet Revolution he was fully rehabilitated. Today Jiří Kubík lives in Ústí nad Labem and still studies religious texts and carries out preaching and missionary activities in the Jehovah‘s Witnesses Church.