Karel Němec

* 1949

  • "But we also said that we would set up the Coordinating Committee in Jihlava, which we did in the summer, around August 1989. The meeting took place, I was not there, because there was an animosity between one person from HOS and me, because there was one mindless anti-communist, completely insane. This was also known in Prague. I gave up the meeting, he wasn't there for the HOS movement either. And there they succeeded with the Independent Peace Movement, Children of the Earth, maybe there were also Havlíček's children (Havlíček's youth), I don't know, Pavel Novák had a connection to that."

  • "There was a cooperation between all civic initiatives in the opposition. That was my idea in the 1980s, when communist governments began to fall around Hungary and Poland, round tables began to form and coalition governments were formed. I was convinced that our opposition had been the best organized since the founding of the Charter and that it was a shame that we could not unite like the Poles. I promoted it in Prague, but it did not meet with enthusiasm. When I asked about the reason, I was told behind the scenes, unofficially, that the personal animosity of Václav Havel and Václav Benda prevented it. Each one wanted to lead a united opposition."

  • "They [State Security] knew that I belonged to the left and that I had contact with the highest reformers of the sixties, because they shot me with a camera when I went to the Čestmír Císař´s apartment in Vinohrady. They told me that, they didn't hide it. They didn't hide their findings about me, they didn't keep it a secret. Because they saw in me the district's future Gorbachev, as they [State Security] were preparing for it in the eighties and ninety-ninth, which were the most informed. So, they didn't invite me to visit them, but they went to my office. When the demonstrations were in Prague, they came with a paper to sign that I would stay in Jihlava or that they would take me into custody for forty-eight hours."

  • "Coincidentally, I was authorized by someone's suggestion, out of those twenty people, to present it at the fountain. That's what we did, I mean on Wednesday, the fountain. However, the square was still empty, we were quite premature. Even though we had a microphone built there, it was strange to me where they got it, because I didn't know the man. He introduced himself as Spolný. Opposite in the barracks, we knew that upstairs there was a State Security apartment, a station. They were filming it. The day after we decided that I give a speech at the fountain, in the morning, the final bus stops were covered with a leaflet with a writing by a marker: 'Students, attention: Karel Němec is a State Security agent.' So I had a really hard 24 hours, because it could probably have been a provocation. And I was later told that it was a provocation that the students would not cooperate with us. I was told by Pavel Novák if I was sure I had a clean file, so that I could give the speech [at the fountain], so I did."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Jihlava, 30.07.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 02:01:26
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

South Moravian Rudi Dutschke

Karel Němec, filming for Memory of Nations, July 2021
Karel Němec, filming for Memory of Nations, July 2021
zdroj: Memory of Nations

Karel Němec was born on January 2, 1949 in Jihlava. During the German occupation, his father Jaroslav, the leader of an illegal Communist Party organization in the Dačice region, was arrested in 1941 and imprisoned until 1945 in Kounice dormitories and in Bavaria. In 1949, the family moved to Jihlava. The witness‘s father, a supporter of Marxist ideas, accepted an offer from local Communist Party officials to become a director of a political school. He left the office two years later due to disagreements. At high school, Karel Němec became involved in the student movement of the Czechoslovak Youth Union and after the dissolution of the union he served as a chairman of the district independent school union. After the August occupation, the witness´s father did not pass the normalization checks. During the years 1987–1989, Karel Němec wrote and reproduced samizdats under the names New Socialism or For Democratic Socialism. He published the most interesting articles by Brno and Prague authors from the circle of left-wing dissent, as well as some foreign texts. He participated in the reproduction of the periodical Dialog, which was published by the Obroda club (The club for the Socialist Reconstruction Obroda). He established intensive connections with this left-wing opposition initiative and invited leaders to several secret talks in Jihlava. He got several names from the dissent community at the Club of Democratic Socialism in Jihlava and sought to unify independent civic initiatives. With the idea of establishing a Coordinating Committee of Independent Civic Initiatives, he succeeded in Jihlava, where in the summer of 1989 the so-called roof agreement was concluded. After November 17, 1989, he publicly gave a speech on behalf of the Coordinating Committee in Jihlava Square, which was to be preceded by provocative actions of the State Security. After the fall of the communist regime, he remained a supporter of direct social democracy and without major ambitions he appeared on the candidates of the CSSD political party. In 2009, he co-authored the second and expanded edition of the Almanac of the Silenced Victim, which was dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the burning of Evžen Plocek. He lived in Jihlava at the time of filming (July 2021).