Pavel Palme

* 1947

  • "I received anonyms, threats, and that if I don't resign, they have other arguments for me that they will put me in jail. So, I had to deal with these worries too. Then it happened once that we got up on Saturday as we were getting ready for a gathering in a prayer room. I opened the main door; I had a a Zhiguli parked in front of the house. There were broken flowerpots on it, so I sat up and said, 'That's enough.' But it was my daughter's car, which they fortunately minimally damaged, so I went to the head of the criminal investigation police to get protection for my family, and he says, 'It's not so serious that we have to give you protection.'"

  • "I will want this and that object, I will get four more participants, they will fictitiously pay a thousand crowns, they will register for the auction, which means, there will be at least five, then it could be a Dutch auction. They organized it like this, where I know that five people registered according to the registration, when we checked it before the auction, if everything was in order and there was even a sixth participant. So, we were happy in our minds that the sixth participant would take it from those mafia men. Coincidentally, I bid it as a bidder, so I was happy and bid to sell it. I waited, I called for one of the six people to decide, I didn't say how many participants there were, it wasn't said, it wasn't published anywhere. So, someone sign up - in the end one of those mafia men signed up and got it for the ten percent."

  • "So, in 1985 I received an offer to promote from the most ordinary worker to the head of the establishment. And I told them I'd take a week to think. After two or three days, the cadre official called, it was not the chairman, but the cadre official called me, so I said I took it and set the conditions. The conditions were for me to have a trial period until the end of the year. And I said that I would never join the Communist Party, I am a believer, you will have to tolerate me as a believer and not say, 'Go to church there, so that no one can see you, so you do not embarrass us.' "

  • "I remember playing as a five years old boy in front of the synagogue where we lived, on cubes or cat heads. I remember a passenger car from Komenská came down the alley to Traplova street, I think it was the Tudor brand. A car arrived and stopped in front of our house. Two or three gentlemen in long mantles got out and went to our house. And I was wondering what kind of gentlemen they were, whether I should go home or rather stay out. Fear did not allow me, and I decided to stay outside and wait for these gentlemen to leave the house. When I got home, my mother was at home with my youngest brother, who was two years old, my sister and my older brother were at school, my father was at work, my mother was crying at home, she was sitting in the corner. When I looked into the room, it was turned upside down, as during inspections. I got scared, so I cried, I was five years old and I asked what was going on, and she says, 'They checked and looked for anti-state literature that we could keep at home.' "

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    Brno, 06.02.2020

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People should cooperate

Pavel Palme, 1967
Pavel Palme, 1967
zdroj: archive of the witness

Pavel Palme was born on March 28, 1947 in Boskovice to a faithful family of members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He spent his childhood with his parents and three siblings in a rented old house in the former Jewish quarter. In the 1950s, during the church‘s official ban, the family experienced a difficult period, secretly meeting with other believers in apartments and reading the Bible and forbidden literature. He also witnessed a house search in their house. Adults and children had the biggest problems in keeping the Sabbath celebrations. In 1965 he trained at the Drukov Brno school in Ivančice and later began the basic military service in Bechyně. After returning from the war, he started working in the Lidokov company in Boskovice as a plumber. In 1968, he did not agree with the arrival of the Warsaw Pact troops and he considered emigrating. From 1978 to 1980, he completed a distance learning course for the Bible officials (a substitute for a Bible seminary). During the normalization, he continued to work as a laborer until 1985, when he was offered the position of the head of the foundry in Sloup. After fulfilling the conditions, he had set (for example, that he would never join the Communist Party and he would continue to go to church), he accepted the offer. The year before that, at the age of 37, he studied a secondary industrial school in Jedovnice and graduated. In 1989, under the conditions he had already enforced when he took the leading job position, he also began studying at the Evening University of Leninist Marxism (VUML). He took part in the events during the Velvet Revolution and, as a member of the Civic Forum, took part in the round table negotiations. He later became the vice-president of the ONV (the District National Committee) in Blansko in the areas of economy, housing, transport and agriculture, water and forestry, trade and then the trade licensing office. In 1990 he was appointed the chairman of the privatization commission for the Blansko district. He received anonymous letters, was threatened, and he also experienced mafia ways of acquiring property in a small privatization during his work activity. He was running a family bakery in Mladkov u Boskovice since 1993 and currently (2020) lives in Boskovice.