"Back then, in the job where I was, then after the revolution it was private, it was called Spojprojekt Praha, so at the time of the normalization I had a lot of resources for samizdat through a colleague. Today I have a full shelf at home, all possible things they came from abroad and it was all typed here. I was in a situation, where I received typescripts from a friend and those were already the first xeroxes (silly ones, but at least they existed) and I was always at work at our place (we were based in a house on a construction site in Kavčí Hory) and I always waited until work was over and nobody was there to make maybe 20 copies and then I put them somewhere and that's how it got distributed. I always hurried up to make it and I told myself that no one would see me. In addition, after the revolution there were certain debates, the head of our so-called centre was a communist. And there were also attacks on me and he said: 'Be careful, he was always against it. Always there in the evenings he kept multiplying the texts.' I didn't know about it; he knew of me and didn't turn me in."
"That was the Russian way. They divided your apartment in such a way that it was almost impossible. There was a hall from which we had a kitchen at one end; two rooms at the other end, and the two old people they put in there, they had one room and another across the hall. And from that kitchen there was a door to the bathroom. And they had a door to the bathroom from that room. We shared a bathroom and a common toilet in the hall. For fifteen years, we lived like that. Moreover, in that political situation in which especially dad was, so any solution like an exchange or offering us an apartment was out of the question. So, it was like... I remember how much mom was crying about."
"I had some signature sheets and in the then military project institute, I was already in civilian state, so we organized signing events there and they knew about it. So I was then in a similar situation to my friend. By chance, my acquaintance was there, who came and says: 'Look, Venco, if you can, get out of here quickly before they jump on you, because they've got everything you've been doing here.' And that was nothing, just a petition for Palach. So, I left at my own request. Then I changed jobs at three different places, I worked a few months here, a few months there, and maybe as I changed several jobs during the year, I could have gotten lost."
Architect Václav Aulický was born on March 1, 1944 in Prague. In 1967, he successfully graduated from the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the Czech Technical University (ČVUT) and began working at the Military Design Institute, where he participated in the design of Transgas buildings, among other things. From 1974, he worked at Spojprojekt, where he implemented a number of his own designs, of which the Žižkov television tower is probably the most famous. Since 2005, he has been teaching architecture at CTU. With his wife Zdenka, whom he met during his studies, he raised two daughters. In 2021, he lived in Prague.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
