I used to bind samizdat books at the state printing plant
Stáhnout obrázek
Vavřinec Korčiš was born on 7 February 1948 in Rumburk into the family of Vavřinec Korčiš and Věra Korčišová, née Šilhánová. He grew up in Horní Poustevna in the Šluknov region. His father, born in 1925 in Mariková, Slovakia, was a partisan during the Second World War, a communist after the war, and later a Chartist and dissident. Vavřinec Korčiš Jr. studied in Litvínov and in 1966 joined the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University. He did not finish his studies and in 1968 he transferred to the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. In the environment of Prague students, he was politically profiled on the radical left and belonged to the circle from which the Revolutionary Youth Movement (HRM) emerged. After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, he became involved in the illegal activities of the HRM, especially in the printing and distribution of leaflets. At the turn of 1969-1970, the group was exposed by State Security. His partner, Petruška Šustrová, was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison. He managed to hide until he turned himself in to State Secirity. He spent 15 months in pre-trial detention. In 1971 he was punished with the length of detention already served and released. After returning from prison, he started a family with Petruska Šustrová. He worked as a worker in a printing plant and in Metrostav. In 1977 he signed the Charter 77 and during the normalisation period he was one of the less visible but important figures of dissent; he participated, among other things, in the production and binding of samizdat for the Petlice edition. After November 1989, he worked in the presidential office of Václav Havel and then at the Ministry of the Interior, where he participated in the transformation of the post-Soviet security apparatus. He was certified as a participant of the resistance and resistance against communism. At the time of recording (2025) he lived in Lovosice.
