Michal Ženíšek

* 1954

  • "Well, I remember it [the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in 1968] very well. Because the first thing was that my mother called me not to go on the balcony because there was a barracks on the opposite side of the street. And I was like, 'Okay, I won't go there.' But of course I went there, right? And I remember all the people, what everybody was doing. And what everybody did afterwards. And it's not nice. It's not nice, that those people just... The first book that I read in my life, that I paid for myself, that's pretty important... Or maybe there were two of them. One was called the Chronicle of a Lost Trail by Jaroslav Foglar, and it costed me ten crowns and fifty. And eleven fifty was this book called The Taste of Power by Mňačko. And I read those books, first one, then the other, and I realized how thin the dividing line was. That someone can be a good person in certain situations and, on the other hand, a complete swine of a man in others. And that's just what the book by Mňačko was about.”

  • "During the interrogation, did they try to recruit you as a State Security informer? Did anything like that happen?" - "I don't know. I don't remember much. I don't know, like... It was said that I should... Like I had to promise them that if he [František Otto] wrote me again, I would give them the letters. And if there was some development in that matter I had to tell them, I had to let them know. And they told me that they would find me, that they would know if something happened. I didn't put it in context. But the main thing was that they showed me the passport, to let me see they had it, but they didn't give it back to me. And they told me that they were starting a criminal prosecution against me for illegally leaving the country."

  • "They took me to the police station, to the office. I don't remember much about it. We took a different path to get there. I think we went through that prison. Maybe they did it to scare me. I entered the prison. They frisked me there. I could keep my cigarettes. Then we went to their office. Then when we went to get the letters, we used different exit route. That's when I found out that it was connected with the house where this Štědrý fellow lived on the first floor or the ground floor maybe. So I told them. I know that. They told me they didn't know him or I don't know what. When you went in there, it was the first or second office on the right. That's where they just asked me if I knew where I was. I said I didn't know. The Formánek guy read from some paper he had in front of him, he told me that I was in the State Security Investigation Room and that I was accused of illegally leaving the Republic. I was terrified, it didn't cross my mind to just laugh at them. I was twenty or twenty-one. It was just a completely different time. I knew all the stories about the State Security men, from Flajzar and so. He got maybe nine years and served a substantial part of it, then he was released."

  • "Beacuse that he lived in exile, that is, outside the Republic, and was only allowed to come here after the Revolution, he was the person who ran the Czech bookshop there because he was also the chairman of the then SRPS, the Association of Friends of the School. He just sort of coached it, he was the spokesman, because it was a Czech school. He was the only one who was always available. He had a shop on Lindengasse, which was the street adjacent to Mariahilfer Straße. That was Peter Pastrnak's role because he was the chairman of all these associations and he knew all these people who came to buy books from Canada, from Sixty-Eight Publishers, so they had it sent to him, he sold it. The cooperation with him was totally cool."

  • "The idea came about, as I said, at the moment when I saw František Derfler, a soloist of the National Drama Theatre or the State Theatre, I don't know what it was at the time, standing there in a queue. I told him about going to Vienna to make a film about exiled authors and so on. And he suggested that it wouldn't be bad if a similar bookstore was here, so that he wouldn't have to just stand in these lines that were really there, and there were plenty of them. Derfler being an old dissident and an old Charter 77 petitioner, it was quite logical that he would be interested."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Brno, 14.02.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:18:22
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - JMK REG ED
  • 2

    Brno, 15.02.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:08:43
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - JMK REG ED
  • 3

    Brno, 04.05.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:12:57
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - JMK REG ED
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I didn’t want a bookstore as a source of money. I wanted to sell books that weren’t available anywhere else

Michal Ženíšek in 1992
Michal Ženíšek in 1992
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Michal Ženíšek was born on July 9, 1954, in Hradec Králové into a clerical family. After the second renewal of Junák (Scout Movement) in 1968, he took the oath in the local organization in Hradec Králové. In the 1970s, he met František Otta, who emigrated to the USA in 1973. Michal Ženíšek planned to travel to the West to meet him, but the State Security knew about this plan and arrested him in July 1975. He spent two days in detention on suspicion of preparing to leave the republic illegally, but the charges were dropped. Michal Ženíšek is listed in the Security Forces Archive as a candidate for secret cooperation/StB informer. However, he denies knowingly cooperating. In 1978, he started working at Dílna 24 Theatre (Theatre in a Tent), and later at Beseda Chamber Theatre in Hradec Králové as a stagehand, inspector, and occasional actor. From 1982, he worked as an inspector at State Opera Brno and also as a stagehand at Husa na provázku Theatre. In the late 1980s, he worked as a production assistant and assistant director for Krátký film Praha. He participated in filming the series Slovácko sa nesúdí. In 1989 he signed A Few Sentences manifesto. In November 1990, he founded the first private bookshop in Czechoslovakia thanks to his contact with Petr Pastrňák, who ran a bookshop for exiled compatriots in Vienna. The shop was located on Květinářská Street in Brno and since 2004 in Alfa arcade. The bookshop closed in 2023 after 32 years.