“Well, the Charter 77. To be honest… this was a period I was completing my study at the Party school. We were informed that the Charter was being distributed and signed but nothing more. We got home and there were meetings to refuse the Charter but none of us actually saw it. Even the leading secretary did not know what it was about. None of us was sufficiently courageous to shout that the king or the emperor is naked. We all sort of refused it, saying that everybody who wanted to help should help in active work and not by attacks on the system. They should do it elsewhere and not in this way to use the West against us. This was it. It was forced. Then no one of us returned to it. For the long five or six years we pretended the Charter meant nothing. We did not comment on it at all.”
“I was woken up in the morning by the guard that there was a call from the main barracks that they could not get to us, as the side barracks, where we were located, were surrounded by Russian tanks and infantry. So the order was to distribute weapons to the men and to declare readiness for fight. The administrator of the stockroom was a soldier of the basic military service, same as me. First we distributed machine gun ammunition, then automatic missiles and grenades. When we were distributing the assault grenades, I was approached by my superior, saying: ‘We won’t give them grenades, we’ll keep them taped over. If something happens, a grenade kills too much. If something happens with a bullet, you kill just one guy, but a grenade kills too much.’ We took the grenades back and created a defence of the barracks. While we were fortifying ourselves those on the gate started talking to the Russians freely, exchanging cigarettes. Most of the soldiers were suddenly at the gate and talked. There were no controversies, no reproofs, nothing like that. The next morning we managed to get in touch with the officers who took command. But anyway, what ammunition and other stuff disappeared then. You cannot really imagine it.”
“The problem that worried me a lot was that I quite liked training my unit politically. But there were situations when I was not really able to respond. On the one hand we taught soldiers that against us, each U. S. Army infantry battalion is equipped with a battery of Honest John missiles with the range of 25 to 30km and we had just 150mm cannons. The carriage is connected to the pivot and there is a spring. This spring was loosened when you moved the cannon quickly. And when you moved the cannon barrel to the side and looked carefully, you could see the label. ‘SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’. So these were our weapons. I complained that it was difficult to explain. I was much scolded by the artillery commander who explained to me that we indeed had weapons but I just did not know about them, as they had to be kept in secret.”
“One of the things I could not get accustomed to was that when there were meetings of the District Committee or the Central Committee, the presentations or discussion comments were written in advance. They had to be consulted with the District administration, the Central Committee and there it was decided whether Vilda Navrátil of Rapotín can speak as a Central Committee candidate or not. I had my presentation ready but when the District Secretary read through the introduction, he just told me that it was like me and that I was to piss off. I walked out, because in my presentation I claimed that we were walking in a circle. We looked into the centre of the circle and what we saw there was shit. The life runs by us and we, instead of reading that shit, were buried in it. The shit comparison was not acceptable so I could not speak. Instead of me, an agricultural secretary of Frýdek-Místek, the father of the EP MP Konečná, spoke about agricultural companies getting ready to transfer to the Slušovice system. This was not controversial (sic!) so there were no problems with it.”
“The way I saw it was that each laid their bets the way they liked. Friends keep telling me: ,Where did you break?’ I never broke. I behaved in a certain fashion until there was a question whether a situation can be maintained so that it works at at. You had to take a stance. My stance was that I ended up in the Party apparatus. I was not forced. I joined out of my conviction. Despite the fact that I did not want to be a part of it. That I was happy there? Not at all. The general secretary was very clever, since when I arrived for the interview he laid out all the arguments that I had prepared. When he stopped speaking, he asked: ‘Do you have anything else?’ - ‘No, I don’t.’ ‘What will you do? You have two options. You leave your Party book here and leave or you keep it and join in.’ I did realise then that I couldn’t leave because of my father and others in the family who had been engaged in the Party for years. I could not find a reason to leave my Party book their, I kept it and joined in.”
František Merta was born on June 13, 1944, in Prague. His two uncles were members of the Defence of the Nation resistance movement during WWII and were arrested for their activities. Uncle Jaroslav Evald was executed in March 1943 in the Berlin prison of Plötzensee. The father of František Merta was a member of the Sokol resistance, in 1945 joined a resistance group organised by the communists and after the war joined the Party. František Merta went to study grammar school in Šumperk and later went on to study medicine but abandoned his study against the will of his parents. For another half a year he worked as a driver’s assistant at ČSAD (Czech transport company), then started studying at Mendel University in Brno. In 1962 he applied for Party membership and two years later became a member of the Communist Party. On graduation he went to serve in the military and witnessed the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies as a second lieutenant in Aš and Cheb. After his military service he passed normalisation checks and himself took part in such a committee in Velamos in Roudnice nad Labem. In 1971 he joined the Party administration in Šumperk. Three years later he was delegated to study the Political University run by the Communist Party. In 1980 he became the district secretary of the Party in Šumperk and held the post until the Velvet Revolution. In 1996 he was an unsuccessful candidate of the Communist Party for the Senate. Currently he is a member of the municipal board of Šumperk.
