Martin Kučera

* 1968

  • "I was most impressed by Jan Ruml's speech at the meeting. He recalled how the West was shocked by how few people were able to influence the regime in Czechoslovakia so fundamentally. They were shocked to find out that some eight hundred people had signed the Charter, not a million - as in Poland, for example. Until then, Polish Solidarity and the Charter made the same impression on them."

  • "I wanted to become a member of the Commission of Inquiry into the Events of 17 November. I wanted to achieve the arrest of these people in red berets who looked like paratroopers. Who committed much more senseless violence than all the other police officers who were there. All the riot police were following orders, but these people were exemplarily violent. So I tried and I wanted to catch them. I didn't make it to the commission, but I was invited for questioning. I spent two hours there, but the commission didn't care much. At that time I was disappointed that the commission was not interested in the description of the person, how many people were there and what they were doing. They asked me about ordinary things that everyone knew at the time."

  • "Suddenly we saw armoured personnel carriers coming from behind and unrolling a kind of a better wire fence. And they, with more people with truncheons, pushed us into almost a square space where the Bar Association building is today, with that former arcade. In addition to people being pulled out of the crowd, there were these isolated incidents of very brutal violence. There were people in red berets, they looked like paratroopers, they had high laced boots, you could see that they were not ordinary soldiers. They pulled someone out of the crowd, four of them jumped on him and beat him so much that he was left lying down. They dragged him away by his legs. One of them stood up with his truncheon and his hands on his hips and asked who else wished to discuss. That way the euphoria turned into a feeling of absolute helplessness. After some time we found out that people were walking away through the arcade and that an aisle had been created. It looked like there was no choice but to run through it and get beaten up in the aisle anyway. So Roman, a friend, and I each ran through on our own and we got out."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Zlín, 25.08.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:48:55
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Policeman held out his hand to a girl so that he would help her. Then he beat her with a truncheon on Národní Street

Martin Kučera after graduation in 1986
Martin Kučera after graduation in 1986
zdroj: Martin Kučera´s archive

Martin Kučera was born to his parents Jaroslaa and Jiří on 22 May 1968 in Vsetín and grew up in a small village near Uherské Hradiště. There he also completed primary school. Especially his mother was anti-communist, because his grandfather‘s trade whad been confiscated by communists. The whole family listened to the Voice of America. In 1982, Martin Kučera entered the electrical engineering school in Brno. With his classmates he founded a recessionist group and illegaly broadcasted music from banned bands. From 1987 he served his compulsory military service and with a friend started planning to emigrate. At the end of the military service, he collected signatures for the petition Several Sentences. In 1988, he signed Charter 77. On 17 November 1989, he arrived in Prague by train to take part in a student demonstration at Albertov. He was at the head of the procession, which clashed with a police convoy on Národní Street. He witnessed explicitly violent police behaviour and demanded fair punishment for the aggressors. In 1990, he distributed Student Letters and attended the first ever meeting of the signatories of Charter 77. Despite his skepticism about post-revolutionary development, he remains politically engaged. At the time of recording he was living and working in Slovácko.