Bohuslav Holý

* 1954

  • “This was human fear, I was genuinely afraid. The people who are nowadays saying that it had all been agreed and negotiated in advance and that it was easy, they’re lying. There were people such as myself who took the risk, but they were afraid. The general strike had been prepared, but no one knew whether it would work out. And this is my memory of a burden falling off my chest. Because it worked. The enthusiasm was unparalleled, and even Skoda factory joined in. Pepa Bernard, my friend, got together with other people and they got the Skoda factory workers and brought them to the square. And that was a major victory.”

  • “I’m not sure to what extent this was happening, certainly on the level of dramaturgy someone was interfering. The censors had this special term for it, subversion, meaning that there was some form of political sabotage or protest present in the piece. And of course, we especially looked for it in every piece and tried to highlight it. When we did the Rag Ballad by Voskovec and Werich, it gave us the delightful opportunity legally to say on stage: ,Instead of bread, we chew on slogans.’ There was always something that for us meant resistance. The censors were looking for these subversive moments and tried to suppress them. I don’t remember any unpleasant times for instance during rehearsals. The directors mostly felt like us. And I don’t remember a director who would be a devoted communist. This is what I have always loved about the Alfa theatre, and why I have been so happy there until today.”

  • “I have this memory. In 1969, we were watching the Czechoslovak ice-hockey team on TV playing the Russians at the world championship. In those days, our ice-hockey players’ emblem was a Hussite pavise shield with the red communist star over it, and some players had already plastered the red star over. As a way of protest. And our national team defeated the Russian team. Prague exploded in riots. The crowds took the Aeroflot, the Russian airline shop, by storm. Here in Pilsen, we watched the ice-hockey and then we took to the streets. It was a large crowd. We were walking from the Slovany neighbourhood to the Náměstí Republiky square. More and more people were joining us, and they were chanting things like: See the Russians fuming, when the Czechs are scoring! As we were getting closer to the square, the tune had already changed, and now the crowd was chanting: Death to the Russians! It had escalated quickly. There were radical sentiments in the society against the occupation and the occupying forces. That’s what I sensed at the time, anyway. What happened after, the period of checks and political purges, was a huge let-down.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Plzeň, 02.02.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:09:49
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

We were the first ones to go on strike in Pilsen

Buhuslav Holý in the early 1980s
Buhuslav Holý in the early 1980s
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Bohuslav Holý was born on February 3, 1954. His father Bohuslav Holý was an Evangelical pastor. Under pressure from the State Security, he gave up his calling and worked as a labourer. His mother Anna Holá was a housewife. The Holýs had six children, which was not common in those days. At home, the family openly criticised the communist regime and exercised a great love of the arts and theatre. After the invasion of August 1968, during which Bohuslav was at a Boy Scout summer camp in Sušice, as a fourteen-year-old boy he started distributing newspapers bringing information about the occupation. Soon after, he started mingling with the revolting youth of Pilsen. Although he originally trained as a chemist, in 1977 he got a job as a stage technician at the Alfa theatre in Pilsen and in 1984, he joined the ensemble as an actor. It was in this theatre that he witnessed the events of the Velvet Revolution. During November 1989, he helped organise the strike of Pilsen theatres. In 1992, he married Klára Tomczová and together they had two children. After the revolution, he visited many countries with the theatre and was still working there at the time of the recording in 2022.