Pavel Šimon

“They dropped us in Pankrac, it smelled of newness at that time, there was apparently a completely new prison, because the colors smelled. In fact, I was arrested there. I was playing a little hero. They gave us bags on our hands, in which we had papers. One cop says, 'Who are you?' What are you? ʻAnd I say, “It is in the bag, so look.' And he said, 'Ah, a hero. Then they led me to a room, undressed me and leaned me against the wall. There I stood naked leaning against the wall for some time, then a cop came and began to inspect me. He shone a flashlight in my ass, looked at all sorts of my body holes, my mouth, he shone in my nose, they were making such a chaos. However, before I was undressing, I had the Havlíček Youth badge in my pocket. And I had shoes with a round logo of the Shine, and I thought maybe they would overlook it. So I put the badge in my shoes. But when they looked at me and I stood by the wall, they looked at those things and it fell out. The cop looked at it and said, 'Um, Havlíček's youth. Well, he would be proud of you. ʻI remember that very well. And then they gave me things, took my shoelaces, a belt, my watch and led me to my cell. I spent in the cell, which I then understood, 48 hours of custody, without food, with five people in that small cell. In fact, we couldn't sleep, they were shining on us, instead of a window there was just a glass-concrete, so we didn't know if it was day or night. Oddly, the toilet in the cell was not separated, so we had to do it in front of others. I found it not so easy to defecate when there are four people next to you. And after 48 hours the door suddenly opened and we were supposed to leave. Of course, we were thinking of such things, they will release you, but then you will be locked up again and when the iron gate at Pankrac opened, we ran, I ran to Vyšehrad to the subway. There I got on the subway, I went to the main railway station and by train I left.”

“There were motorcycles all over the fields, because the factory was producing them, and of course there wasn't such a consumption that was supposed to be. The boxes were all over the fields, those platforms with motorbikes. It was approximately ten thousand pieces. I still remember that I didn't understand why the bikes were there.”

“I had my mind open, I thought, well, I would go to the companies in Havlíčkův Brod and they would give me work somewhere. I went to Pleas, starch factories and similar factories. When they found out that I was an engineer with experience in construction, designing, they said, yes, we want that, and offered me two or three positions. But then I was always called by the StB and Mr. Pučala, or actually a comrade, told me with such a jovial voice: 'Pavel, and why don't you want to work in Motorpal?' I said: 'I don't know Motorpal is not really a type of a factory where I wanted to work. I do not really like it. I did not even think about working there. ʻAnd they told me they would recommend me to stop and look there, that they were waiting for me there. And that it doesn't seem somewhere else would hire me. And I thought, they're idiots! I was there and these people want me. So I went to those people who said, ok, we're going to hire you, and then I realized that really – suddenly, everywhere they said, 'We changed our minds. We had a meeting now ... The situation changed. 'Those who wanted me, suddenly didn't want me. At the end I said to myself I'd try to go to Motorpal. There was a former soldier in the staff department and I still remember the picturesque situation when he told me if I knew what a tank attack on Havlíčkův Brod would look like. He had a hockey stick made from pencils and played hockey on a calendar. I told him I didn't know anything about it, and he said, 'You see, and you should know. Look at the map. ʻAnd he really had a map above his desk, where he had a pencil-marked direction of the tank troops. Then I found out that he was a military attaché, who was also doing personnel policy. And he said, 'We've been waiting for you to come. And you still didn't come. Now you're finally here. `They offered me a job in construction, which wasn't even a construction, but rather a preparation room with four boards. I was employed there and started to work there.”

“I was arrested, it was on October 28 in Prague, there was a demonstration which I attended. I still remember how people were standing on Wenceslas Square and then the guys with the white helmets and shields came from the subway. There were some Estébáks (Czech Secret Police agent from the Communist era) in the crowd, some of them we already knew just from the glimpse. And when those with white shields came, I went in front of those people and yelled, 'Get them!' I saw some people turn around because they thought I was a provocateur. So the naivety was huge. I did something quite intuitively. They drove us to the Yalta passage, I remember we shouted: 'We have ID cards! We are citizens! ʻAnd so on. And they said, 'That's nice, so prepare them. You will need them. `Then they squeezed us until one side of the crowd opened, there was an alley, they released us and began to beat us. I ran, of course I ran as fast as I could, I got about two or three shots over my back, I fell to the ground and suddenly someone pulled me away. Civilian cops pulled me to the bus from the crowd. There I leaned my hands on the bus, they took my ID, started checking me, talking to me. My eloquence was probably good, because I remember telling the cop who I was, what I was and he said, 'Why are you doing such bullshit?' I said I did everything I could to be a proper citizen, but the regime unfortunately does not allow me to do so and that I am completely desperate. And that's why I found myself there. He gave me back my ID, started talking about me with a colleague, so I ran away. I ran down to Můstek, to the Old Town Square, but there was a corridor where the cops stood. And I, as I was mad, I ran and ran into them, hysterically. I probably knocked off a cap of one cop and they took me. Then they talked about me through a transmitter, they found out that I had escaped from Wenceslas Square. There was the anton (a police car for the transport of detained persons) at the Old Town Square, so they gave me handcuffs, threw me into the anton. They tied up my hands to the lamp, and there I waited. I waited for a while and I heard them say, 'Take them to Ruzyne.' So we went to Ruzyne, but then they called, 'It is full there. Take them to Pankrac. `So they took us to Pankrac.'

“And then I came to work one morning and I was invited to the office that morning. There were Myslivecek, Axman, Mládek ... "We have two offers for you. One is a notice to quit by agreement and you have a chance to be here somewhere at work. The second notice means that you will go right away and nobody will hire you here in ever again, and here you will sign our cooperation.”

“Then we made a marching to Havlíčkova Borová, which was one of the most massive events of Havlíček's youth club. At that time we thought that we would make a marching on the occasion of Havlíček's anniversary. Tens of people attended, maybe sixty. There were also people who had nothing to do with Havlíčkovka, people from Jihlava, from the nearby villages. It was considered as a big event. Of course, we announced that there will be a marching. But there was still silence. We found that weird. We met at Havlíček's house where we had a short speech. Then we started the marching and after a while we noticed a helicopter circling above us. And there are cops and police cars in the side streets. So we realized it was an event they were very well prepared for, and they were just waiting to see how we would behave and whether they would intervene or not.”

“It was difficult for them, because they all had porn cassettes, Deep Purple, Boney M and disco records in their lockers. In fact, it was not compatible with their socialist lifestyle, so they were also in a serious contradiction. They enjoyed the capitalist entertainment, they were all living it, because what they were doing there ... The OV SSM Brodsky, from what I saw and experienced there, was such a whorehouse that I did experienced in my life not even in Dukla, in the training center and in the underground. The fact that there was a live broadcast of group sex somewhere in the bathroom ... Myslivecek had a full box of porn cassettes, so when he wanted to project something, he did something wrong there and suddenly there was porn. They were watching it at those meetings, so they really were hogs, par excellence.”

“But now I was naked. He told me, 'To the wall!' So I went to the wall and he began to examine me everywhere in all the body holes, they examined me, with a flashlight. He said, 'So what? Do you have something somewhere? Maybe here, in your ass?ʻ And then they went to search my stuff, I heard him take those shoes, and I heard the badge fell out. He said, 'What have you got here?' So I turned. He looks at me: 'Look at the wall. So how should I tell you what I have there? So he took it and showed it to me, and I tell him it's probably some sort of a badge, that I don't know about it, it probably fell out from somewhere. So he turned and said, 'Havlíček's youth club, well, he would be proud of you, he would be proud of you.' I remarked cheekily, that he would be really proud of us, and I believe he is.

“He ( J. Hammer – remark. edit.) suddenly stood up and disappeared, so I was looking for him, and someone told me he was in the boiler room, so I phoned him. The phone was down from the office. I'm telling him, John, where are you? He said to me, 'In the boiler room, I am the boiler room operator.' And I say what crap it is, and that's how he was babbling. The next day I came to work and he threatened somebody to kill him/her. I think it was Mysliveček or one of those idiots, because there was a club room there and at the other side of it there was OV SSM, their offices, and it was walk through. He came there somewhere and knocked on the door, threatening to kill him and so on. Of course, I was arriving to work a little later. Anyway, he was taken by an ambulance, and since then I do not think he recovered from it. Step by step we found out that a lot of the documents we had from Lipnice were actually taken by the StB, or hidden somewhere, because some documents later appeared, or some of the StB got them after the revolution. However, the whole thing had a tragic result - Honza went insane. ”

“Havlíček's youth club actually arose from the fact that we were thinking about how to profile the activism. We were largely isolated, almost 100% isolated from Prague, from dissent, from Chartists. There were a few chartists in Jihlava, there was one or two in Havlíčkův Brod, but for example Honza Schneider, who was in the Charter, was rather hiding himself, he had a lot of children. He was in the apartment, people were coming to him. However, he did not really come to us, he was not in touch with us. Later he told me that he was hiding so he would not make any trouble to anyone. We were unaffected by dissent, and we said to ourselves – which by the way I thought was a brilliant idea - that we would do what they wanted us only without the membership in the SSM, KSČ (the Communist Party), without an organization on official basis. We said to ourselves that we would start doing temporary jobs, cleaning streams, raking leaves, going to Z events. At the same time, before we went to such an event, we wrote a report and sent it to the StB, to the district authorities, the police and other organizations that managed political and social life in Havlíčkův Brod. But then we said to ourselves: After all, we were from Havlíčkův Brod and [Karel] Havlíček was in Havlíčkův Brod, once, and he was actually a dissident. We began to learn about his work and we found him as a great guy, a man about whom we never thought in this context before. We thought he was totally suiting the positive context of the thing. The Bolsheviks talked about Havlíček a little, but not much. (...) All the time only quotations, mold, moles, jezovits`, diminished him to a critic of the regime of that time and the church. Nevertheless, we studied his work and life and we said to ourselves: this is an ideal person. And because we were young and there was a Youth Union, we decided to be the Havlíček Youth, that we try to make an organization. Svazáci (members of the Communist youth club) were doing temporary jobs and visiting various events during the build-up years, so we said that we would do it too. They can't tell us anything for that. We began asking for the official recognition, but it was not allowed. Therefore, we started doing it so-called arbitrarily. We found out, for example, when Z events are at the construction of the ice rink, and we started going there. The master or a construction manager was totally excited, because he never had there 20, 30 people for the temporary job. And suddenly there were people there. Or in the paper they wrote that there is a dirty stream in the Future park, so we went to clean it. The funny thing was that they had no idea what to do about it at first. Therefore, we always did it under the supervision of a Estébák (Czech Secret Police agent from the Communist era) or a cop, and they didn't know how to stop us.”