Dalibor Dědek

* 1957

  • "We were passing through Prague at about eleven o'clock in the evening, on the seventeenth of November. It was insanely dead, there were cops everywhere, something was flashing everywhere. The next day we found out what had happened. Then things started to boil over in the factory, a general strike was imminent. There's another episode, very strong for me personally. It was split up, some people were scared, some people were putting themselves in the role of protesters, suddenly they were backing down. They were saying - We have children at home, what if I lose my job, my children, they'll be expelled from school. Like normal fear. Students from the University of Liberec came, there was going to be an agitation for a general strike, it was going to take place on the twenty-seventh of November. The students came to agitate to speak to people in the manufacturing rooms, but they got stuck at the reception, the gatekeepers wouldn't let them in. All they had to do was find someone who had permission to take them to visit. There was a guy called Mirek Bubnů, he was an IT guy, he had my phone number, a contact. He asked me if I could find the courage. My boss told me - Don't do it, you have children too, it can still turn around. It was a very powerful moment. The word got out in the factory, I thought, "Can't one person be found among a thousand people? Will I be a coward like the others? I was going to the reception to get them, in LIAZ, as big as the buildings are there, people were flocking at the windows and looking at me going in there with them. The gatekeepers were glad someone came to get them. There were about fifteen of them [of students]. I took them into the manufacturing departments, like quenching, for example. They all crowded in there, I'll see those people behind the windows for the rest of my life, looking at it in horror and with joy that they got in. Yet two days before, the comrades deputies of the director and someone from the special department had been there and threatened that whoever went there on the general strike would have their employment terminated. In the end, what happened was that a few hours or a day before the general strike, the top management of LIAZ met. I didn't see into the power structure, but they decided to dissolve the People's Militia. There was a big unit in LIAZ, armed with machine guns and everything, and people were afraid. I don't know who among the comrades had the courage to take that step. The People's Militia also had a brass band in LIAZ. And in the end they were going to be on a general strike accompanied by a brass band, and there it completely turned around."

  • "There they interrogated us for 24 hours, the whole point was that they wanted to know what documents we had come into contact with, what was in the charts, whether we hadn´t, God forbid, photographed it. I took the films I had photograps on and as soon as I got home I burned everything. We knew what we used to carry, I always used to carry the Warsaw Pact plans for the next five years on a city bus in a tin tube. Every time I was going past the villa where the American ambassador lived just outside the Ministry of National Defence, I thought I'd ring the bell and say - Here's something for you to look at. They were asking us (Military Counterintelligence officers) to find out if we had really come into contact with the documents and what we remembered of them. Then they confronted us with each other, had us sign a lot of papers, went to see us. I know that we, for example, we had been cleaning up and taking out the trash, so they wanted to know if we had been taking out the trash and wanted us to tell them what our superiors were writing about. Then they gave us a break for a while, then the chief called us in and said - Guys, what happened is, these documents shouldn't have gotten to us in the first place. It should have stayed with the armaments administration in the Ministry of Defence. But they were lazy to do such slave work there and they didn't want to do it, so they gave it to their subordinates and they in turn gave it to their subordinates and it ended up with us or with you. When it finished, they paid extraordinary bonuses to somebody in the Ministry of Defence for doing it. Their subordinates came to complain that it was them who had handled it. Military Counterintelligence stepped in and found that it had fallen down to us simpletons who had nothing to do with it and shouldn´t have come into contact with it. And that was us, it fell to us. That episode had its consequences, when I went into business, I was doing security technologies and I had to ask for a screening. I found out that I had a record there, I was listed as a Secret Service collaborator. I signed a paper saying that I would give them truthful information. It was while I was locked up. It was the same case as President´s Havel. From this point of view."

  • "In that August of '68. We liked to sleep in the attic with my sister, it smelled of hay, there were old beds, we read at night by torchlight. In the morning, when the Russians invaded, my sister cried that it was a war. I didn't understand if she was playing at something, so I went downstairs. Grandma was listening to the radio, airplanes were droning outside, then tanks were driving on the roads. It was a huge shock for us, I remember my mum came home from work by train, I think it was 11 o'clock. The first thing Mum did was stand in the queue for food, everybody was buying food, they were afraid there would be a shortage of food. She brought flour, pasta, she brought a whole salami, which was something for us kids, it was a big investment. Some people tried to express their disapproval of the Russians invading. The radio was full of reports that people had been shot in Liberec. We were scared. We lived at the road to Jičín, and people were putting posters on the wooden caravan, like - Ivan, go home! There were reports and information that the Russians had shot similar places to pieces. My parents decided that it would be safer, because they were going to work, to take us to the other grandma in Karlovice, it was about three kilometres away on foot, and more sheltered. They packed a small suitcase for us, we walked past the back of the cemetery, along a dirt road. When we came to an asphalt road, there was written in lime - Hang the collaborator Machačný! That was my grandfather. When my parents saw it, they had serious doubts if they were leading us in the right direction. When we arrived at my grandma and grandpa's house, my grandfather was chopping wood in the yard. Dad started discussing the Russian occupation with him, Grandpa was a diehard communist and started swinging an axe at Dad. So the idea of staying there was quickly abandoned. And they took us home again."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Liberec, 10.05.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:40:43
  • 2

    Liberec, 13.05.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:44:09
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

He saw both horror and joy behind the windows of Liaz when he brought the striking students there

Dalibor Dědek at the age of eleven
Dalibor Dědek at the age of eleven
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Dalibor Dědek was born on 21 June 1957 in Jičín. He lived with his parents in Radvánovice. Since childhood he was interested in electrical engineering. His grandmother told him about her experiences from the First and Second World War, which he recorded on a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the late 1970s. At the age of 11, he experienced the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. His parents took him from Radvánovice to a safer place in Karlovice to his maternal grandfather. But grandfather was a diehard communist and welcomed the Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia. There were calls in the village to hang him. The parents preferred to take the children back to Radvánovice. The witness´s father appeared in a photo of people in a factory protesting against the occupation. The family later faced problems because of this and Dalibor Dědek was not allowed to apply for secondary school studies. He trained as an electrician, later graduated from a secondary technical school and was admitted to the Czech Technical University (ČVUT). In his first year of studies he got married and had a child with his wife Lenka. He finished the university studies and started his military service at a special small unit in Prague – Kbely. There he came into contact with top secret documents. The soldiers were investigated by members of Military Counterintelligence (VKR) because of these documents, and the witness spent a night in a cell in Ruzyně prison. Military Counterintelligence made him its collaborator without him knowing it. He signed an agreement to keep VKR informed of developments in the case involving top secret documents. But he never came in touch with VKR again. The VKR file caused him trouble in the period around 2017, when he briefly got involved in politics. During the Velvet Revolution, he was working at the state-owned company Liaz Jablonec as an expert in microelectronics. He brought students into the factory, who persuaded employees to support the general strike on 27 November 1989. After 1990, he started his own business and became the owner of Jablotron, a security technology company, which he and his colleagues led to a multi-billion annual turnover. He was behind many charity projects, and after the Russian army invaded Ukraine in February 2022, he joined a fundraising campaign to buy weapons and other equipment for the Ukrainian army. He and his wife Lenka had two children of their own, a daughter and a son. In 2022, he was living in Bzí in the Jablonec region. He was living with his girlfriend taking care of her two young daughters.