"We stayed in Bratislava until Friday. I took part in a demonstration on the Slovenského národního povstání square, where I heard Dubček and the people who represented the year 1968 for us. Lasica or Satinský spoke there, Slovak actors spoke there. We left the demonstration at almost ten o'clock at night. Around midnight we were at the motorway at the Nine Crosses behind Brno and there a gas station attendant told us that Jakeš had resigned. At home I had a message that I should come to the theater on Saturday morning. I arrived there and at that time the Civic Forum was in its infancy. I was there with those people ever since."
"For years, we perceived that the regime weakened, that it had to come to an end. Although people thought like that about it for forty years, at that time… The next day I was surprised by the brutality with which the police intervened. That is, the SNB, the National Security Corps. At that moment, it was clear that it is not possible to continue like that. Then there was a friend of mine who came - I was working at Drupus at the time, which was a design institute with about forty people - with a protest letter to the Prime Minister. At the time, the idea of someone signing a letter protesting against the Communists was inconceivable. I took it and I was the first to sign. I went around the forty people in Drupus and none of them signed it."
"In the fifth year, first of all, they brought us things that we had to buy, I didn't want them, that was the first thing. The second was that our pioneer leader, a very committed communist, wanted to tell us something and asked the unfortunate question, 'Kids, have you ever seen a beggar?' When I was a little boy, I went to the hospital and there were dozens of them sitting and I threw crowns at them. Instead of saying, 'Okay, but now it's ten years away and there are no beggars here,' which was true, I would have to keep quiet. She looked at me and said, 'You're lying!' When someone said I was lying, I was so upset that I wasn't rational. I told her, You are lying, you have no right to teach us! ’The rest of the class took me as their class leader, I spoke for them. Suddenly, everyone started to get up, 'I saw them too!', 'Me too!'. She ran away from the classroom. After about forty years, after the revolution, I learned from my former classroom teacher that this woman wanted her to write in my report that I was not allowed to study, which did not happen because my classroom teacher refused to do it."
Miroslav Petráň was born on June 13, 1951 in Pardubice and lived his whole life in a house built by his grandfather. His mother was a clerk and his father, a graduate architect, could not pursue his profession in the communist era. In the fifth year, he had a conflict with a female pioneer leader. After high school, he graduated from the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague and began working as a designer in Pardubice. He got married and had two daughters. In 1976, he and his wife managed to travel to Sweden. In the 1970s, he also worked in the Soviet Union and he recalls the miserable conditions there, far from the propaganda image of the time. Immediately after the intervention on Národní třída on November 17, 1989, he signed a protest letter to the Prime Minister. Subsequently, he participated in the first demonstrations in Pardubice. He became involved in the Pardubice Civic Forum and for many years remained active in communal politics, and he was also a member of parliament for a short time. He served as chairman of the board of the Horse Racing Association and under his leadership the Velká Pardubická (a famous steeplechase cross-country race) gained international prestige.
