Jiří Hajner

* 1949

  • "When there was a Palach week or a partial demonstration, I was always there. We were on Wenceslas Square and there was a milk bar on the corner. They used to give us paper bags and we would blow them up and they would explode. The protests in those days were not like in France, where they set cars on fire. The protests back then were just us banging bags. I was caught and checked by the Public Security officers. When I took out my ID card, they saw that I had a bunch of bags in my breast pocket that were being slammed there. So they saw that I was one of them. We couldn't fit in the antons, so they took us to Bartolomějská. An armed policeman sat by the driver, guarding our bundle of IDs. In Bartolomejska we were greeted by an alley of policemen, which we had to pass through. That's where I got my first slap on the wrist. We spent the whole night in the corridor and were interrogated. In the morning, they let us out so we could go to work. Nothing ever came of it, no more persecution. So that was the one time I got caught."

  • "Whenever something happened, the Bolsheviks would call us into the biggest hall and present us with a pamphlet, and we were expected to express our disapproval and sign our names against it. The director, the chairman of the Communist Party, spoke about it, and we listened. I timidly spoke up, saying that I would even sign the document, but I wanted to read it first to see if they could read it to us. But this infuriated them. They said that I had to believe them, and if they said something was wrong, then it was wrong. I got the manifesto and secretly showed it to people to read, maybe in the toilet. When it was leaked, they called me in and issued me with a notice. By then I had been working at CKD for a number of years. I submitted about ten improvement proposals, I was in the Scientific and Technical Society. They just called me in and fired me."

  • "For the first time in my life I was scared. First they shot at the Museum because they didn't know exactly where they were. They thought the Museum was a radio station, and that's why the Museum was shot up. In the following days they came in front of the radio and we got on their tanks. They came out and looked, and we spoke to them in Russian, the language we had learned in school. At first glance, they were people with non-European features. Someone explained to me later that this was the first strike force. When a conflict breaks out, they send just these inferior troops, counting on them to die. They were not Russians, but people from different republics, non-European types. They had headphones on, then they got into the tanks and suddenly started shooting. We ran, I was hiding in a parallel street by the radio station, in one of the houses. The one who was more scared pushed me out of my hiding place... I really experienced that. I don't even know if anyone was shot there, but I don't think so."

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    Praha , 03.08.2023

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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He who went straight was bent with a truncheon, he who went bent was straightened with a truncheon.

Jiří Hajner in 1958
Jiří Hajner in 1958
zdroj: pamětník

Jiří Hajner was born on 8 April 1949 in the Vinohrady Maternity Hospital in Prague. His father Josef was a typographer and typesetter, his mother Libuše took care of the household. The family was well situated, mother‘s parents, the Cvejns, owned a house in Nusle. After the divorce of his parents, Jiří Hajner stayed with his four years older brother and his mother, who was negatively impacted by the divorce and could not cope with taking care of her two sons. Jiří therefore spent a lot of time in children‘s homes. He trained as a turner in the Czech Industrial Works, where he worked for thirteen years. From the age of fifteen he earned his own living and at the age of twenty he married and started a family. In the sixties he spent most of his free time in groups of Prague boys, belonging to the so-called „CKD“. In August 1968, he witnessed the events surrounding the extraordinary congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, photographed the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in the streets of Prague, and fled from the shooting of Soviet soldiers. He was a member of the Scientific and Technical Society and had over ten improvement proposals to his credit. In 1977, he was fired from ČKD because he questioned the company‘s opposition to Charter 77, which management demanded of employees. Thereafter, they did not want to employ him in state-owned enterprises. He was eventually hired at the Motex manufacturing cooperative, which produced diagnostic measuring equipment for vehicles. At the end of the 1980s he participated in anti-regime demonstrations, and during Palach Week in January 1989 he was detained by the Public Security Service (VB) and brought for interrogation in Bartolomějská Street. In 2023 he was living in Prague.