Pavel Papazov

* 1958

  • "And then I promptly joined the army, and that got me to Písek, where I am, where I was first. CVO, military specialty number, 101. That was a rifleman, that was a common soldier, you know what that is?" - "The worst thing that could have happened." - "Of course." - "I guess my mother pleaded with my father for me, my father dusted off some contacts somewhere. So, I advanced to an office position as a graduate, where those schools had some delays. For a while, I worked with the finance officer, where I counted money and handled paperwork, meals, and so-called 'reluty,' which were payments for soldiers when they traveled. Then this graduate student came along who was part of that, so I was moved to the chief of records, where again the military books were and just leaves and things like that, where I was getting into the core of the system. Because the officer, he was some kind of an anti-communist, he was a warrant officer, he had an officer's rank, and he was a very decent guy. They were all there, bordering somewhere in Slovakia, Hungary, like Dezider Finta for example, yeah, that's not a normal name, that was the chief, the staff. Which I can say even less, but I found it so comical, because they practically couldn't even write Czech properly, like - and there I made a second military leave passbook, I had access to that, including stamps of everything, and various passes that allowed me to move around wherever I needed to. So I fled to Prague, and here I was, they sent me twice to Republic Square, as the General Staff. So there was a military computer center down there at the time, it's huge down below, it's down there. And that's where I was, and that's where they used to bring in the documents for clearing officers' pay, which was top secret. It sat with a sealed bag and I always got one of those orange passes to go with it and I found those orange passes in there, like there's like a stack of them by all the different forms, so I took a stack of them in there like that. And then I made them, so I actually had passes in my pockets that authorized me to enter the General Staff and all kinds of things. And it turned out that somebody turned me in, I guess, and the Military Counterintelligence caught me with all that stuff I had."

  • "I once went to a house and there was a guy I knew, I know where he even lived, and he said to me, 'Where does this Papazov live here?' I'm Papazov.' He punched me, well, you know? And I knew him by sight." - "And did he justify it?" - "No. He slapped me normally, then he kicked me himself, and I rolled down the stairs like this, like a mezzanine, and walked away. I didn't even say this at home." - "And there were more of that sort of things?" - "Well, you know, it wasn't right in that September, August, but maybe a year or so later. 'You're actually from somewhere, how long have you been here?' And I still have that to this day."

  • "I was woken up by my grandmother - I was alone in Lišov, my parents were in Prague - so she woke me up with the words that the war had started, which is probably how everyone was woken up at that time. Of course, I didn't understand the war either, so I went to the window and I saw that on the main street, because we were on the main street in Lišov, it was the 5th of May Avenue - but that was the name of all the main streets back then - there were actually tanks, not only tanks, armored cars, trucks, everything. To this day I am surprised that my grandmother agreed to this, I would not have allowed my child or grandchild to do this. I got on my bicycle and rode along the sidewalk, not on the road, I rode right up to this Vávra, as he had this elevation on his house, and there I leaned my bicycle, I went to get him. In the meantime, Strnad, that's the farmer, I couldn't remember, Strnad, my friends, my boys or my friends, came. We just stared, where you see, right, the tanks rolling, for an hour maybe. That's just there in the middle of Lišov, not far from that Vávra's house is that church, but this is the street and this is the T turn, they were going down to Třeboň from the top and there were two benches in that T turn and there was a kind of a pillar and there was a mirror for the T turn when somebody was coming out, and we sat on the benches under the mirror, and we watched it, the stream, if I remember correctly, sort of stopped, and other tanks started coming in, and they were actually turning like this, I don't know, ten metres in front of us. As it turned, and there were houses on the corner and they didn't give a damn, so sometimes somebody would take it and turn it and a piece of that house would tear that corner down like that. And we had these bikes leaning over here, and we'd sit there like this and watch."

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Pavel Papazov, 2022
Pavel Papazov, 2022
zdroj: Post Bellum

Pavel Papazov was born on 25 January 1958 in České Budějovice to Zdeňka and Nikol Papazov. His mother was Czech, his father Bulgarian, who graduated from university in Prague and later worked in diplomatic circles. He lived with his maternal grandmother in Lišov, near České Budějovice, during the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops. He and his friends watched the tanks passing by. After the invasion, he experienced a xenophobic attack. In 1973 he entered the Secondary School of Services, Trade and Catering in Moravská Street in Vinohrady. He served his basic military service in Písek and was investigated by the Military Counterintelligence for forging leaving permits. After returning from the war, he worked for the Czech Union of Production Services in the sales department. Later he worked at Prodex and the Barbara night bar on Wenceslas Square. In the 1980s, State Security (StB) asked him to inform on its guests, which he refused. In the summer of 1989, he signed the petition Several Sentences. In the 1990s he ran discos, but eventually decided to go into the catering business. He set up a restaurant in the Prague district of Karlín, which he continued to run in 2023.