Petr Jílek

* 1956

  • „My father got a warning, he quickly detached the horses from the wagon, he threw the things which he had on the wagon into the barn, then threw other things and tarpaulins over them and jumped into bed next to my mother. My mother was heavily pregnant, she was expecting my brother, who died later, the one I was talking about. But there was one interesting thing which saved the whole family. They remembered that they had forgotten to give water to little rabbits, here in the Polička region they call them little hares. So my father got up and went to get them and they gave them to drink from the baby bottle. The female had died before, so that's why they were doing it like that, they were giving them water. And while they were doing it, suddenly there was banging on the door and Germans [appeared] in the kitchen. And they started playing with the little rabbits. And they didn't bother to search the house, because they probably would have thought to look at the wagon. They would have seen that the horse probably had come from somewhere, they weren't stupid, they were soldiers who had been through the war. Maybe the dead female, because the female had died, our family is alive. That's what we tell ourselves sometimes.”

  • „About the arrest in Brno, there was something a little bit more cheerful. I was actually arrested because of my bag and they were looking for what kind literature and leaflets we had. And I had a book called Mosses and Lichens with me. And the investigator, the interrogator, one of State Security members, he started leafing through it and turning it upside down, and it was really just about mosses and lichens. There was nothing else. But otherwise it wasn't very funny because when they were dragging me up I was already bruised and there was blood on the stairs and I know they beat up the photographer who was taking pictures.”

  • „The headmaster who was there, it was a small village school, three classes, he was a vicious man. He beat us, children, and he beat us a lot. Because [he forced me] to kneel in front of the desk with my arms outstretched, and on top of that, I still remember it to this day, so that I wouldn't do it sloppily, he put a pencil on my arms. I was kneeling for a long time and I started crying because it was long, and the pencil fell off, so I got beaten. I didn't want to go to that school, it was really tough. And there was no appeal against it because the headmaster was a big communist. That was the beginning of the cooperative farms and the communists were, I don't want to be rude, but I can't think of a decent word for those people, everybody was afraid of them. Even in that village there was fear of these bolsheviks. So there was no appeal. I stayed in the forest several times, I didn't go to school, only that an eager neighbour found me, she saw me in the forest, so again I was in trouble even at home, well it was very hard.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Polička, 25.09.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 02:32:48
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - HRK REG ED
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I‘ll never forget the sight of the stairs covered in the protesters´ blood

First communion in the church in Borová, 1955
First communion in the church in Borová, 1955
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Petr Jílek was born on 4 December 1956 to a Catholic family in Polička. His parents, Ladislav and Marie Jílek, were private farmers. They had six children and farmed in nearby village Oldřiš. Until 1961 they resisted pressure to join a cooperative farm. From an early age, the witness worked on the farm and helped in the cooperative farm. The family was Catholic, and because of this, the children experienced bullying by teachers and were not allowed to study. The witness trained as a gardener. The family felt strongly about the Prague Spring in 1968 and the subsequent occupation by the Warsaw Pact troops. In the 1970s, the witness served his military service and went for a training in the Soviet Union as well. He was shocked by the reality of life in the communist superpower. From the early 1980s he was active in the Czechoslovak Union for Nature Conservation, cooperated with the Brontosaurus ecological movement, and he was a leader of a nature club within the Pioneer Organization. In the 1990s he kept in touch with Brno dissidents and distributed samizdat literature. In October 1988, he participated in a demonstration on the anniversary of the [independent Czechoslovak] Republic, where he was arrested and interrogated by State Security. From then on, State Security took interest in him and, among other things, exerted pressure on the employer to dismiss him. In November 1989, he became involved in the revolutionary events in Brno. He helped distribute leaflets. Later, in free political situation, he worked as a garden designer for private owners. In 2020, he was already retired and was living in Polička.