Milan Ohnisko

* 1965

  • “My answer will be very brief I’m afraid. My expectations… I don’t know if I had any expectations and what they were. So let me answer the second part of the question instead: I never regretted anything for one second. Not then, not later. I feel that if, with a bit of a hyperbole, I was at the decisive age of maybe sixteen now and that situation occurred again, I cannot really imagine my life story unfolding in a principally different way from how it did. I never regretted anything.”

  • “I certainly feared they would beat me up because it happened now and then. For example, my good and close friend at the time, the dissident and poet Jan Pukalík who sadly committed suicide in 1988, got beaten up in Brno during an interrogation in the regional headquarters of StB in Lenin Street by a secret policeman called Bata. He beat him quite brutally, dragging him on the ground by his hair so he pulled some hair out of his head. It was quite brutal. Things like that happened and I had a truly primitive, almost animal fear of getting beaten up too. That scared me. That was one thing that used to scare me. I didn’t fear psychic pressure because there was not much for them to press on; I was in an auxiliary profession, quite lowly manual position, no children, no family so there was not much to press on. The other thing that I feared every time I was interrogated was that it would end up with them taking me directly to detention, then to court and then to prison. Those were the two things that scared me during every interrogation – being beaten up and being imprisoned. I would lie if I said that I wasn’t scared – I was.”

  • “It was only at the beginning, during one of my first interrogations at Leninova. Capt František Veselý, ‘my main officer’ who combined a familial and fatherly attitude with a sort of secret police austerity and malice, told me I was on the verge of abyss and that it was really up to me only: Either I will go on and end up really badly, or I will turn my back on all of my… I don’t know how he put it – maybe buddies or so – and everything would be all right. That was the only thing, and other than that I cannot remember them ever offering me collaboration. If they did, I may have forgotten or it was not important or distinctive. Then again, I do remember finding out after the revolution that two or three people had informed the police about me; they recruited them for collaboration and they were confidents. Things were simple for me in this sense because I was never pressured into anything.”

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    Praha, 05.11.2015

    (audio)
    délka: 03:19:32
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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Kryl and Hutka opened the doors for me

Milan Ohnisko ca 1982
Milan Ohnisko ca 1982
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Milan Ohnisko was born in Brno on 16 July 1965 to a family of a designer and an office worker as the elder of two brothers. His parents did not oppose the regime in any manner and brought up their children so as to accept the same stance. The witness started a grammar school in Brno but left after a brief period; then he started a librarian high school but left again soon. He then worked in assistant worker positions from then until November 1989. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s his older friends introduced him to the unofficial recordings of Karel Kryl and Jaroslav Hutka and samizdat literature. He wished to meet Brno‘s dissident and became involved in anti-regime activities thanks to Petr Pospíchal in the early 1980s - he operated as an interface between the Brno and Prague dissidents, typed and distributed unofficial documents and samizdat, canvassed petition signatories and so on. Due to that he was detained several times, investigated and monitored by the StB. The last two occasions when he was detained were on 21 August 1989 and shortly after 17 November 1989. After the Velvet Revolution he got involved in Brno‘s Civic Forum, working as a correspondent of the Brno chapter of the Eastern European Information Agency. He later managed a publishing house, operated a bookstore and worked as a publishing editor. He relocated from Brno to Prague four years ago and he currently works as an editor of the Tvar literary magazine. His long-term dissident activities earned him the certificate of a member of anti-communist resistance in September 2014.