Mikuláš Pánek

* 1956

  • "At seven o'clock, a small group of people really gathered there. I don't know how many of us there might have been, one hundred and fifty, two hundred, maybe, let's say. Since the theater was closed and there was no elevated space and there were several rows of people in the audience, we chose as a platform the windowsill of the then grill bar, which is today the Moravian restaurant, and we were lucky that Honza Látala was in the crowd, a boy who was on Národní třída in Prague on the 17th. So, he described it very precisely there, how it happened. At that time, we didn't have any official statement from the Civic Forum or anything like that, but suddenly a man appeared at the end of the crowd, pushed his way into the middle of the crowd and started shouting for us to disperse. That this demonstration is not permitted and that we will all be affected in some way. My current friend, I didn't really know him at the time, the engineer Milan Stejskal, was so prompt that he turned to him and said to him: 'Sir, do you think that the great October revolution was allowed at that time?' And by that the man I'd rather say comrade, finished, he was completely gone. We found out ex post that it was really a comrade, a great comrade, that it was the district prosecutor, Comrade Voda."

  • "When I was talking here about the records I got for Christmas, I must not forget one that my mother bought me and which was absolutely essential and is still essential for me today, and that was Karel Kryl's first and only album in the Czech Republic - Bratříčku, zavírej vrátka. After that, I listened to Radion Free Europe radio Voice of America with my friends from the tramp movement, especially one, and we recorded, especially Kryl's songs. So, I had a huge collection of lyrics and tape recordings on disc tape recorder. I learned a lot of those songs. My friend and I actually competed to see who would learn which song first, and then we were here in the village pubs around Olomouc, where we used to go for fun, either to Domašov or to Uničov region, to Nová Hradečná or then higher up in the mountains, so we played them. Strangely enough, even though local villagers sat in those pubs, who might not have liked everything, strangely enough we never had any State Security patrol break into the pub and deal with us. I guess we were lucky.'

  • "However, I still got to the secondary grammar school. Of course, I had a lot of problems with Comrade Director. Just because they knew what family I came from, who I was. But not only because of that, but also because of such trivialities as clothes, long hair and so on. But when I finished the secondary grammar school, he decided not to let me graduate, to at least make it a little bitter for me. So one of my fellow professors was given the task of failing me at graduation. Fortunately, there were reasonable people in the graduation committee, and in the end they let me go with a D on my graduation certificate. But that wasn't all, Comrade Director was not lazy, and when I applied for acting at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts - already at that time I realized that it was one of the few universities that I would have a chance to get into, because with my Dossier (a file with information about one´s class background, one´s views and ideological attitudes) and what Comrade Director writes in my report, I can't get anywhere else. So, I applied there. Paradoxically, because admissions to JAMU (Janáček Academy of Performing Art) and DAMU (The Academy of Performing Arts in Prague Theatre Faculty) were always sometime in February, I was the first from our school to be accepted, even though I knew I wouldn't get a recommendation, because they accepted me. However, Comrade Director was still not lazy and wrote a letter to JAMU, how is it possible that a person from such an unreliable family got into the university and that it is a scandal and that they should do something about it. Of course, I found out about this ex post, when I was already at that school and one of the sensible teachers there told me that they got it, that they studied it, but that they had so much sense that they threw it in the trash and didn't deal with it any further."

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    Olomouc, 28.02.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:50:39
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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It started in front of the theatre

Mikuláš Pánek in 2022
Mikuláš Pánek in 2022
zdroj: Post Bellum

Mikuláš Pánek was born on October 22, 1956 in Olomouc. He spent the first years of his life in Varnsdorf, where his parents Miloslav and Věra performed in the local theater. But he hardly got to know his father, because he left the family only a few months after his birth. The mother then moved to Olomouc, where Mikuláš studied elementary school and then grammar school. In his youth, he was involved in tramping and music, among other things. He experienced several interventions by the police forces on tramping trips, and because of his long hair and style of dressing, he almost failed the secondary grammar school graduation exam due to the intervention of the director. During his studies at the theater faculty of the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts (JAMU) in Brno, he tried to avoid military service by faking mental illness. Only after spending five months in a psychiatric hospital in Kroměříž did he get his dream blue book. After successfully completing his studies, he performed in HaDivadlo in Prostějov, in Šumperk and from 1987 in the State Theater of Oldřich Stibor in Olomouc (today the Moravian Theatre). During the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he participated in a theater strike in Olomouc, moderated discussion evenings, organized demonstrations and also participated in the founding meeting of the Olomouc Civic Forum. He was elected to the Olomouc city council in the first free municipal elections. He also worked in the Security Information Service (BIS) for two years before returning to the Moravian Theater in Olomouc in 1995. A year later, he founded a dubbing studio, which he ran for four years. He also devoted himself to dubbing during the time of filming in 2022, when he lived with his wife Jaroslava in the settlement of Habartice in Šumperk region.