Jiří Trnka

* 1971

Disident, Emigrant 1948 – 1989, Studentský aktivista během Sametové revoluce v ČSSR, Svědci lokálních událostí z éry komunismu, Umění a cenzura, Underground
1. 1. 1977 - Prehlásenie Charty 77, 28. 1. 1977 - Tzv. Anticharta, 17. 11. - 29. 12. 1989 - Nežná revolúcia v Československu, 17. 11. 1989 – Demonštrácie na Národnej triede, 29. 6. 1989 – Zverejnenie manifestu Niekoľko viet, Odsun sovětských vojsk z Československa, Palach Week
  • 1
    Přehrát
    Pozastavit

    Instead of joining the Communists, my father joined the People's party

    (video)
    délka: 01:19
    Download file
    Info

    „My parents were not explicitly in any dissent, they were not Chartists. But because my dad, in particular, moved in unofficial circles, we had different information, we learned about various statements, events; we talked about it quite openly at home or during those visits to different people, that’s where we heard these things, we knew about them. Back then we listened to Voice of America every night. Nothing extraordinary, but they certainly did not agree with the regime. There is this story with my dad when he worked in that boiler room. On Malostranské náměstí, where we also lived, it was in the same house where the Avicenum medical literature publishing house was located, and he worked for them as a boilerman, and thanks to that we had an apartment there. And they came to him once: 'Look, Trnka, you should probably join the party, think about it.' And he came to them after two weeks and said, 'All right, I'll join. The People's party.'"

  • 2
    Přehrát
    Pozastavit

    At Kolbenka, I read the students' statements and the commies went on strike

    (video)
    délka: 01:13
    Download file
    Info

    „There was such a good story from Kolbenka, I have a feeling it was on Tuesday or Wednesday after November 17th. The director of the foundry in Kolbenka called all the ‘svazáks’ (members of the Czechoslovak Socialist Youth Union) to the dining room or meeting room and wanted to speak to them. I was a little more active, I snuck in there, I went there with them. Them and the old men yelled at me: 'Look, go, you're young, go there with them.' So I went there. He was bullshitting about some elements and that no Šmíd was killed there, and then he suddenly played right into their hands, because he asked, 'And do you even know what the students want?' And I had a crumpled student statement in my pocket with some requirements, so I read it to him there. So that was that. The commies said they would go on strike."

  • 3
    Přehrát
    Pozastavit

    We brought wine and food to the East Germans, who emigrated en masse

    (video)
    délka: 02:27
    Download file
    Info

    „In the surrounding states, the regimes began to fall in various ways, and in mid-summer a kind of larger exodus from East Germany began, when the East Germans tried to get to West Germany, first through Hungary and then through the Czech Republic. So they traveled to Prague to the West German embassy in large numbers and wanted to get to the West through it. Since I spent my time around Malá Strana, where I originally lived, and now I was going there to visit my friends, I also experienced it in terms of the fact that the whole Malá Strana was full of trabants and full of people. Later on it was no longer just Malá Strana being full of trabants, but now the whole of inner Prague was full of these cars. The Germans arrived and would force their car keys onto people on the street since they would no longer need them. Such scenes took place there. And we went there to watch what was happening around the embassy. The cops were standing there and they didn't want to let us in. The embassy is in Na Tržišti Street, which is a short walk from Malostranské náměstí above the American embassy, ​​they are next to each other. And then it continues to Petřínské sady, Petřín. So we knew how to get there from behind through Petřín Hill, where the Germans also had a garden, it was just separated by a fence. It was one of the places where the Germans then climbed over to get to the embassy. And we went to them there, we brought them food a few times, we bought two or three bottles of wine and we brought it to them, or brought some apples. We went to see them, and in a way we envied them for approaching their regime in East Germany in this way and finding the courage to emigrate en masse through those foreign embassies."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Olomouc, 10.07.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:57:03
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
    Download file
    Info
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I wish we could all respect the freedom of others

Jiří Trnka in 2021
Jiří Trnka in 2021
zdroj: Post Bellum
zdroj: Post Bellum
Stáhnout obrázek

Jiří Trnka was born on May 9, 1971 in Prague. His father Jiří Trnka was an artist and belonged to the grey zone of artists who were not part of any official art associations. At the Trnka home they would always talk openly about the communist regime, and Jiří absorbed this atmosphere. At the first stage of primary school, he spoke vulgarly about the then head of state, Gustáv Husák, and later, in the framework of compulsory correspondence with pupils from the Soviet Union, he preferred to correspond with a friend whose family had emigrated to Austria. During his apprenticeship years at the Prague engineering company Českomoravská Kolben-Daněk (ČKD), he experienced the atmosphere of the second culture and adopted it as his own. He attended concerts by bands such as Garáž, Půlnoc (‘Midnight’) or Psí vojáci (‘Dog Soldiers’), whose events were often forcibly ended by the regime‘s riot police. In January 1989, he took part in Palach Week, a five-day massive protest dispersed by water cannons and tear gas. In the spring of the same year he signed Charta 77’s petition Několik vět (‘A Few Senteces’). During the summer of 1989, Jiří Trnka bought wine and carried it secretly to the fence of the West German embassy in Prague, where a mass emigration of people from East Germany was taking place. When the Velvet Revolution broke out in Czechoslovakia in November 1989, Jiří Trnka stood in the seventh row of protesters on Národní třída, from where he managed to escape and hide with dozens of other people in one of the houses in Mikulandská Street. In the following days, he collected signatures for the general strike and carried them to The Drama Club, where he also held a speech representing the Prague foundry ČKD, where he worked at the time. In 1993, he married Jana, with whom he raised two children, Barbora and Jakub. In 2018, Jiří Trnka took an active part in organising chain demonstrations under the organisation Million moments for Democracy in Zábřeh, where he lived with Jana in 2021.

Zobrazit celý příběh pamětníka (Czech)
Fotografie (2)
Odkazy (0)