Radomír Kiss

* 1962

  • "Around 1983, I got my hands on the Prague underground magazine Vokno and the boys got a single copy. And I felt sorry that one copy had to circulate among so many people, so I got a typewriter. And I don't know who the typewriter was from - whether it was from my parents, or somebody in the office, or somebody gave it to me, but I don't remember. And thanks to that typewriter, it was a Consul typewriter, I had a really good - a decent number of copies. So I was able to make ten copies. So I would come in from work or I wouldn't go to work, because thanks the housing department, where we were sort of ahead with our work, I always made a 'commitment' to myself that I would do five pages or five to ten pages a day and make it go fast - that copy and make it as dark as possible. So that was, I think, the first copy - the underground magazine Vokno."

  • "Well, there were exhibitions that were official, but some were worthwhile because most of it was organized by - it was very strange, but that was the way it was, it was organized by a chairman of the Socialist Youth Union (SSM) for independent culture. So, for example, he organized an exhibition of painters and printmakers somewhere in their SSM club. It happened from time to time that we would come across such an exhibition. Or I did one exhibition when I was working at the housing department... The housing department had a villa opposite the bus station in Havířov, which used to be rented out for personal celebrations of the employees, so I rented that and there I did an exhibition of a well-known painter from Havířov called Werich. He painted in oil on toilet seats. So we actually decorated the whole family house of the housing department with toilet seats that were painted with oil. So that was the first exhibition that I did, that I did in Havířov."

  • "The older guys had experience with psychiatry or psychiatric hospitalization, so they gave us information. So I remember when I came to the first closed ward, there were a lot of patients who were mentally ill, but there were also patients who were really aggressive and tried to take it out on the newcomers. But thanks to the guys who had been there before us, they told us that we have to oppose those aggressive patients, and then they back off and calm down and leave us sort of open to move around and have an open field of action in those rooms and in the treatment room in general."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Ostrava, 20.09.2025

    (audio)
    délka: 02:09:10
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The humiliation at the station led him to a lifelong fight for freedom

Kiss Radomír in winter at the cottage (1986)
Kiss Radomír in winter at the cottage (1986)
zdroj: witness´s archive

Radomír Kiss was born on 4 September 1962 in Český Těšín. He spent his childhood in the newly built Havířov, but his grandmother Zuzana Byrtusová, with whom he spent time on a farm in Třanovice, had a major influence on him. An important moment in his life came at the age of sixteen in 1978, when he was detained and humiliated by members of the Railway Protection Guard at the railway station in Žilina for no reason. This experience awakened his lifelong resistance to the communist regime and led him into the underground community. He became actively involved in anti-regime activities. He trained as an electrician. To avoid the obligatory military service, he faked schizophrenia. In Havířov, he copied and distributed the samizdat magazine Vokno, and in 1982 and 1983 he organized two years of a music festival on his grandmother‘s farm. In 1987 he co-founded the brass band Kmochova paralýza, for which he was repeatedly interrogated by State Security. State Security started a file of a person under investigation, but it was not preserved. In November 1989 he participated in demonstrations. He holds a certificate of participation in the Third Resistance and Resistance against Communism. In 2025 he was living in Stará Červená Voda, still working as an electrician, and has two children and six grandchildren.