Vladislav Najbrt

“He told me that the East Germans in Leipzig still maintained the tradition of letterpress printing, and in fact, that they kept to printing traditions there. There was a master craftsmanship school in Leipzig. He suggested I should send an application there, saying that I was a typesetter-designer and that I made posters and that I would like to improve my qualifications. I had to send a copy to the cadre department, where the personnel officer tried to persuade me that it was pointless and that we have our own school here, and that if I’m already taking evening courses here, why should I go galivanting to Leipzig - that I had no need for it. She just didn’t want to bother herself with another case, to have another problem that she would have to solve. So I wrote to the Ministry of Education. And just at the time when my dad was dying in hospital after a severe work injury, I got a letter informing me that they had approved and allowed me to study in the DDR, polygraphy, at the engineer’s school in Leipzig.”

“It was a shock, a huge crossroads. I could only speak a little German, I took lessons, I’d learnt a bit from Dad, who could speak fluently. I waited to see what would happen, Mum waited to, but we weren’t nervous at all. I basically expected that they wouldn’t allow me to study when the cadre specialist was against it. But in the end, on the day my father died, I set off to Leipzig. I was afraid that the cadre specialists at the ministry would stop it, like they did with my previous studies, when they barred me from getting a higher degree of education. I wanted to study at UMPRUM [the Academy of Art, Architecture & Design - trans.], but I could only take drawing lessons, nothing else. So I didn’t know what I could get away with. Family came first for me, but Mum told me not to worry about the funeral. The body is just a physical matter, the soul is already in heaven, so I wasn’t to worry myself about it. She assured me that the funeral would be organised by my older brothers, that I shouldn’t feel bad about it and that I should go. So I got on the train in Masaryk Station and set off to Leipzig.”

“When the tanks and planes arrived on 21 August, we were on our way to Leipzig, where we were to have a meeting with the architectural institute. Then it was suddenly swarming with people from Czechoslovakia, and they told us that the country had been attacked. I was there with two officers, although they were in civvies, they were a colonel and a lieutenant colonel. Opinions started to get refined. Our colonels were aghast, worrying that the situation back home was dire, and they wanted to quickly go home. But some Communist functionaries from the architectural institute from the DDR came up and started persuading us along the lines of the Moscow-directed Warsaw Pact and Comecon. They said people in our country had become misguided. Lieutenant Colonel Růžička said I was good with letters, that we’d get some white paint, and we’d paint that there was no counter-revolution at home and that it was all a mistake.”

“I got a call from my colleagues at Freedom Printing [Svoboda in Czech - trans.], where they had collected old original type casting fonts. Those were sets of letters ranging from two millimetres to large headline type. They had historical masterpieces there, inherited and preserved from western type foundries. So they phone me to take it all away and hide it in a barn somewhere, so they wouldn’t have to take it to the scrapyard. When printing shops were closed down, we were obliged to scrap non-ferrous metals - the fonts were from alloys. We had to hand them in, and all they checked were the number of tons, the weight of scrap metal. I told them I wouldn’t be locked up for that. They urged me to reconsider, said they’d protect me, that the gatekeeper wouldn’t write down my entry, so I could take it away. I explained that I didn’t steal, that I was a Christian and I didn’t steal on principle. My mum would have disowned me for that. So I couldn’t save those unique items. Not even later, in the days of digitalisation. They knew my focus on the history of printing, and they offered me machines that were supposed to be scrapped.”

“They started offering me a choice: ‘Either you stay here and become the director, because you’re an expert, but you have to join the Party.’ But I refused all such offers, and I had some pretty unpleasant conversations. I was questioned, they tried to find if I was in touch with any dissidents, but I didn’t even know who they were. They read me long lists of name, but I had never heard them nor come in touch with them. One time in the summer I was held for fifteen years without my family being informed at all. It usually happened in the summer, when people were on holiday. I was in Ruzyně for fifteen hours. They took right inside in my car, and I was afraid to talk of anything in my own car for next half year. So that was the kind of final memento, and then I said I didn’t want this. I was also worried it would start afflicting my wife.”