Petr Pospíchal

* 1960

  • ... I reacted in a way, which may seem from the today view a little panic, I started a hunger-strike. For me it was some kind of concentration of the protest against it, against the hopelessness of the situation, in which I felt puzzled and haven´t got any chance of active gesture. I am not used to receive things passively. The State police in Ruzyně were mostly the members of the Army and it looked very hopelessly. The examiners were old men probably working in their posts since fifties. Things were evoking a really evil, uncomfortable, dark feeling to me; the accusation was built on some unimportant crimes, anything heroic; if I was jailed for something really important, but there were only few Infochs (information leaflets) found at the librarian, some tapes with music, I have never been listening – Plastic people and Kryl – which were not mine. It was all looking very crazy and I was feeling very uneasy. So I proclaimed the hunger-strike. I have decided like that, so I did it... But when you start such a thing, you are expecting something to be done for you to honestly end it... And that was not coming...

  • „..if a person proclaimed unwillingness to join this chain of small unending injustices, the system was destroying and crushing him. When a cap was stolen from somebody, he solved it by stealing it from somebody else. It seemed like some kind of an evil intention somebody delivering less caps then it was needed. But that also couldn´t be the case because every man was committed to wear the cap on his head in any part of the day – walking, literally every time. It´s good not to look for a logical reason. And I admitted to do this. Not only once. When he had asked me “Where have you got your cap?” I answered: “Somebody has stolen it from me. “Don´t bother me, I´m not interested. How is it that you don´t have your cap?” “Somebody has stolen it from me, I don´t have any. And I could solve it only by stealing it from somebody else and somebody else would not have a cap, so I decided I´m not having my cap, because somebody has stolen it from me. And that logically means that somebody is having two caps.”

  • „... they pushed me out (from a bus), took me inside the car and... it was uncomfortable because – and that was something I had realised in the first moment – because nobody knew where I was. Normally in Prague I could make a glance to Ječná and say: “I am going there and there” or something similar, so the things could be reconstructed. But here it was impossible to reconstruct anything, because I haven´t spoken to anybody for a week. May be ten days, because there was a different time period. They loaded me into the car and drove with me through a land I didn´t know... I think that there was an intention ... it seemed to me that they have been having two intentions – one was me not to know where we are going (they were driving me through a land, where there were no signs or village names) and the second to show me, that we are far away from any living beings. Finally we came –using some kind of a road in a field and afterwards a wooden path – to some edge of a rock, which wasn´t abnormally high, but thirty metres are enough, aren´t they?... I could presuppose, that they won´t kill me, but they were hardly pretending, that they can do that as well...

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It´s necessary to formulate a vision for next quarter of a century

Photo from Ota Nepilý
Photo from Ota Nepilý

Petr Pospíchal was born on 16. 3. 1960 in Brno. After the basic school he entered the apprenticeship to a printer, which he finally finished in spite of the Stb pressure. In the apprenticeship he met friends from the ring of Brno dissidents and started to work with them. Reaching maturity was also a date of first questionary at the State Police and three weeks after his 18th birthday Petr was for the first time imprisoned. After returning from jail he again took part in the dissident work and started to cooperate with VONS - a decision followed by more attacks and threatening of the State police. In 1981 he entered the Army service, which, how he says, was worst time then in jail: „The boys there were upset and fed up, that they have to be there and they were compensating it on the younger boys. In jail the screws were at work – they wanted us only to not make problems“. But for the Stb his being in the Army was not enough and in 1987 he was imprisoned for the second time. Finally he was jailed in 1987, but he was released after big campaigns home and abroad. In the spring 1988 he founded with Petr Uhl VIA (Easteuropian information Agency), where he was working also during the velvet revolution. .He was one of the redactors deciding the broadcasting of information about the death of Martin Šmíd. After the revolution in 1989 he had been working as an ambassador in Bulgaria and he was for a long time member of the Committee for radio and Tv broadcasting. Now he is working as an entrepreneur in the field of computer nets.