JUDr. Jan Vůjtěch

"I can't say that I can rank myself on one side with any militants against communism in this direction. On the other hand, I see my whole fate as significant in that from the moment I picked up reason I saw how wrong Marxism was. My study of philosophy here also confirmed me in that. I have always criticized Marxism in particular, for example I had more reservations about the dialectical materialism, of course I had reservations about the historical one. There I knew, because I knew the underpinnings of what was wrong with it. Of course the question of class, there it was clear. So I think that what I see as my destiny as such - which I'm not claiming, I'm happy in a way, it's just that it's giving me wrinkles now, the politics of the moment - that I see everything now as very orderly and purposeful and I think that all the things that have befallen me, like the petering out or the problems at work after that, that they're things that were more or less lawful and it just wouldn't be right for me not to experience them. I think it all seems perfectly natural to me." Translate by DeepL

"When we entered those quarters after the basic training at the place where the President Gottwald mine was in Horní Suchý near Karviná, where I spent the 25 months afterwards, we were told that we had to prepare ourselves to be the dregs of society, not to be classified as respectable, and that we would be treated as such. That we were here for re-education but also for punishment, and that each one of us knew why we were here and so on. So it was the psychological thing of the thing. And the other was that we had to get short haircuts, we got uniforms that were more or less not military, they were tattered uniforms that were still worn by German soldiers in World War II. We, for example, were each given an individual piece of that clothing, including shoes, so it wasn't our size that was taken into account at all, but the fact that we would be resourceful and change things so that everyone could get along. That was the other thing, the military thing." Translate by DeepL

"Truth is that I was not brave. This episode and whole my life show that I was not dissident. But I never hesitated to say what is right or what I think is right. I was always upset by the marxist philosophy. It caused many problems to me when I was showing that this philosphy is not right and that it is not even ethical. I always said something like this and it made troubles not that I helped to destroy the regime. I was protesting because I didn't agree with it. That is why I think the PTP army service was quite natural for me and would be strange if was not there."

"When I was speaking about the watering I was also at the time allowed to go from the mine and into the mine freely without permission. I remember one day I was taking shower before entering the mine and some miners brought a box in the bathroom and started to clean it. In the box was a fellow miner crushed by the steel conveyor belt. They just put him in the small box and cleaned it in the bathroom. There was the smell of mothballs which I hate since then. And I realized at the moment that I am going to the mine to replace him."

"The worst work in the mine was mining in the front section of the mine. The job there consists in mining corridors that delimit the space for the coal mining. And these corridors then widen and miners must build props to support the ceiling. But when you mine there you have to destroy the props there. That was the worst job because it was very dangerous. Bad situation was when the ceiling was not falling after destroying the prop. The pressures of the soil in the mine 1200 metres deep were accumulating and it was clear that it must fall uncontrollably. Then it was irrelevant that you have some props left there, because it just cracked and everybody down there was gone. So for us it was horror to go to places like this. The civilian miners refused to ge there but we were given order to mine it."