"I learned from my father that when the Communists won the elections in '46, they got over forty percent, and Gottwald yelled that there would be no kolkhozes, no cooperative farms. So my father said, 'That's a lie, everything will be on the Russian model, everything.' He, when he was writing down electricity, he would meet with different people who had been in Russia, who had been prisoners of war or had been in the legions, and he would take information from them, from these people."
"I was arrested sometime in the autumn, searched and so on, here on the hill where the chief of police was, where we were driving around, and the State Security men told me, 'Everything out of your pockets, everything'. So I took it out and I had one address in there that I wouldn't like to get into their hands, I didn't have time to dispose of it. The principle was, and this is what Petr Uhl said: 'Write nothing, remember everything. And so now it was on the table, five State Security men were sitting there waiting for the investigator from Brno to arrive, who had the right to interrogate. The regional one. And it took a long time, and now I had all these papers, there were all kinds of tickets, money, and I was thinking how to dispose of it, so I sprang up, grabbed it and ate it."
"Then we filmed how the front was going. In Holešov, there were most of them, there were barracks there, it was occupied, but the commander of the barracks didn't let the Russians in and they didn't go in by force. Then we were filming, so we filmed it all secretly, some officer ran after us with a gun and wanted to shoot us, that it was not allowed - filming."
“There was the accusation of sedition, etc. My sedition consisted in a cyclostyled copy of Talks with Jan Masaryk, which I got my hands on. It was written by Viktor Fischl and modelled after the Talks with T. G. Masaryk written by Čapek, and I made several copies of this book on my typewriter and I gave them to my friends. But it got to somebody who was not supposed to get hold of it. They were monitoring me for some time, they tapped the telephones which I had, and in September 1971 three gentlemen rang my doorbell and there was a house search.. I was sentenced for sedition, according to Section 100, and I served one and a half year in prisons, at first in detention prison in Brno for eleven months and then in the Bory prison in Pilsen. It was horrible, after the first interrogations; I could not imagine not being able to work for the television or film anymore. I liked my job and I grew slightly addicted to it, to film-making. Thinking that I would have to give up my job after I had gotten back from prison and be left just with some menial work, that was unthinkable for me. But I eventually somehow came to terms with it, and then when I went to serve my sentence in the Bory prison, I met several political prisoners there.”
“There were various types of people. I asked one person: ‘What is it that you were sentenced for?’ He replied: ‘I got an LP.’ ‘What does an LP mean?’ ‘Well, it is stands for robbery with violence.’ It was also for the first time when I heard the word ‘tunnel.’ Tunnel, in the prison slang. What does it mean? Well, a fraud. There were people sentenced for ‘tunneling,’ too.”
“When they arrested me, they said: ‘Please place all your personal belongings on the table here.’ I had several addresses written on pieces of paper, and it would not be good if they got hold of them. We were waiting there for about an hour, there were about five of them. I suddenly stood up and grabbed the paper and swallowed it. I learnt this in the Bory prison, we had been sending illegal messages there, too. They weren’t expecting that. They jumped at me.”
“They had no way of tracking me; they must have been following me, but they did not know where I would be the next day and where I would go... While I was in Kostelec, an StB man would come to the manager regularly every week and ask about who had come to see me, and they knew about me. But here, I was one day in Kroměříž, another day in Zlín, and so on, and it was very complicated for them to monitor me in this way. And some of those exceedingly active StB men who were sending me messages that they had talked to some of my friends… they didn’t dare to speak to me directly, and so they would send a message: ‘We would wait for Mr. Němec when we have gathered more on him, for at least five or six years in prison, we will squash him!’ Well, and they managed to do that in 1985, when they arrested me for the second time.”
“There were people of various views there. There were Catholic believers, there were Trockiists like Petr Uhl, there were reform communists and then there was quite a large group of socialists from Brno. They were Šilhán, Jaroslav Mezník, Vyroubal, ing. Pokorný, about eight or ten of them. They were a group of those socialists who wanted to reform the socialist party to resemble the national socialist party as it had been after WWII. At that time, after February 1948, the parties that were allowed to exist were the people’s party and the so-called socialist party, but they were merely attachments to the communist party because they had to follow the communist party’s policy. In spring 1968 they wanted to reform this and a small action program was established. Jaroslav Šabata was one of those reform communists in Brno who were putting it together and these socialists joined him. They were in the Bory prison with me... There were people like general Prchlík, one of the few who had refused the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies, and there were some soldiers as well, but I don’t remember them anymore. In the Bory prison we were allowed to mingle freely, within the designated ward, and we were able to walk from one cell to another.”
Jaromír Němec was born on 16 January 1935 in a working-class family in Babice (part of the town of Kelč). His father Josef Němec ran a pub, which was nationalized after February 1948, and then returned to work as an electrician. Jaromír Němec trained as an electromechanic in the Vsetín arms factory. After the military service which he served with radio mechanics, he was employed for a short time until he finally landed at Gottwaldov (now Zlín) film studios, where he worked as a sound engineer for about eleven years. During the invasion in 1968, he co-directed the entry of foreign troops into our territory. State Security listed him as an enemy person since 1971 - in the same year he was arrested for spreading samizdat and sedition, and served a year and a half in Brno and in Bory in Plzeň. After that, he often changed jobs and continued to be politically involved, signing Charter 77, helping to publish samizdat (Infoch etc.), coying texts and organizing the transport of banned literature across the border. He was arrested again in 1985, but was released after six months. The trial took place in 1989, when he got off with only probation. After the revolution he became politically involved in the Civic Forum in Zlín. He died on 12 October 2023.
