Eustach Broulík

* 1936

  • "In '68, censorship was abolished. But newspapers were produced in the printing press on typesetting machines, and when a page was broken, a flat proof was made and it went to the editorial office to check that it was right. That was read, the mistakes were corrected, then the proofreader got it, and usually the people from HOPS came in. That meant the Head Office of Press Supervision. These guys would come in the evening, they'd stay there until the printing was finished, and they had to read all the pages, all the papers that were coming out. If something didn't seem right, they'd make a note of it and call the editor who was on duty. They said what they didn't like and the article had to be deleted or the wording changed, it just had to be corrected according to their wish. As long as the press supervisors, those two guys, didn't sign off, the rotary press wasn't allowed to start working."

  • "It was organized thoroughly. Whoever didn't want to go changed his mind about not going, because people knew each other, there were companies and mines walking together in the parade. You had the experience that if you didn't go, you felt it afterwards. It depended on who it was. Some people were threatened, and for some people it showed when the bonuses were distributed at the end of the month. That was done by the foremen, so they had to take that into account, the bonuses were then approved by the management and it went up. The foreman didn't dare to do that to a person whom he knew was shying away from political life, that he didn't take part in the May Day parade. For such a person, the bonuses were lower. Even though actually the bonuses were supposed to be for work, whether one did this or that or more. But in the end, what was taken into account was the political manifestation."

  • "Of course it was all propaganda. There were models from Russia, for example Stakhanov. There was a friendship with Donbass. They kept saying that they were exchanging Soviet experience, that it was better there. That was not true, in Russia they had completely different conditions for mining than here, here it was worse. In short, the management tried to get the best results. There was a whole department where they did so-called flash posters. These were posters that were put up every day. There was a draughtsman who drew it, and it said that tomorrow they expected to meet their commitment to mine so many tons of coal. I don't remember the names of all the foremen who appeared on the posters. There was an effort not only from the management of the plant, but also from the regional committee of the Communist Party of the Czechoslovakia, where they were interested in getting as much as possible mined. They were pushing from above. It´s a fact that people got paid for having mined x tons of coal. They did it for money and they had advantages in the shops as well. There were scarce goods, the miners could get it preferentially."

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He said no to the occupation. He was fired from the newspaper, ended up in a scrap yard

Eustach Broulík, portrait, 1970s
Eustach Broulík, portrait, 1970s
zdroj: Witness´s archive

He was born on 20 May 1936 in Doudleby nad Orlicí. He spent his childhood in Choceň and then in Frýdek-Místek in northern Moravia, where his father got a job as a manager in a spinning mill. After graduating from grammar school, he worked as an editor of the company magazine Partyzán Šverma at the Jan Šverma mine in Ostrava. Subsequently, he became editor of the regional daily Nová svoboda (New Freedom). He joined the communist party because he believed that his work contributed to building a country where everyone would live well. However, he resented the fact that newspapers were subject to strict censorship under the communist regime. When Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Soviet army and other Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, he participated in the publication of Spojené deníky (United Journals), which reported objectively on the Soviet occupation. He refused to consent to the entry of the occupying troops during the backgroung checks during the normalisation period, and the communists expelled him from the editorial office and from the party. He worked in a scrap yard until 1989. In 1990 he joined the daily Moravskoslezský den (Moravian-Silesian Day), which was founded by journalists who, like him, had not been able to practice their original profession during the totalitarian regime.