Ing. František Rafaja

* 1943  †︎ 2024

  • “Even before the revolution in November took place, Radio Free Europe introduced direct telephone calls. I used them several times, especially in order to actively participate in the New Year Readers’ Survey. Well-known people, those who were abroad as well as some from Czechoslovakia, would send in their opinions about what impressed them most in the past year – either from recently published books, or from what they have read, and why it was interesting to them. I wrote them several times – I think I sent the letter from Hungary, because we, technicians from Tesla, were traveling to eastern Europe quite a lot. And later I even made phone calls to the radio station, and I introduced myself as František from Central Moravia. I have the broadcast where they read my contribution recorded on a tape somewhere. I copied its content in samizdat as well. And the other contributions, too. To be honest, when I called the radio station, I would always call from work when I was doing overtime, because I needed the call to be anonymous. I was afraid they might find me if I called from home, and I did not want it to have some repercussions for our family and especially for the children.”

  • “In the first half of the 1980s, I was making use of my trips to see Mojmír [Trávníček] in Nový Hrozenkov, I would always borrow some books from him, and thus I actually began creating a second samizdat. I have a number of such books here that I can show you. Obviously, I was not copying it in just one copy, because I had quite a lot of friends. I was copying it on a typewriter, it was a Czech made device, I don’t remember the brand anymore… was it Konzul? I would usually make around eight copies. Typewriting was one method. The second method was using a photo camera. A kind of stand imported from the GDR was being sold here. It looked like a magnifying machine, which had two lamps for illuminating the original and on top there was a thread socket where you could fit a photo camera lens. This way we were able to print a large number of copies, for example complete Dictionary of banned authors by Josef Škvorecký from Toronto or the book by [Zdeněk] Mlynář: Frost Comes from Kremlin. And many other publications. The book Poets in the Shadow of Gallows by Dr. Kratochvíl. There was more of it. In the late 1980s, some people even started copying samizdat with xerox machines. But it involved some risk, because the xerox machines in companies or even in the Fotografie company branches, where this service began to be offered, were being closely watched. I even have one such experience: when I was in Zlín and I came to copy some articles from the magazine Řád about Bohuslav Reyner for my friend Jungmann in Zlín, there was some man standing behind a curtain and the lady who operated the xerox machine had to show him the original, he nodded if he approved it, and only then was she able to make a copy. On top of that, they stamped the paper copy with the Fotografie Gottwaldov mark.”

  • “I had one bad experience. I was making use of time during the train journey to Valašské Meziříčí to work and back if I was taking a later train or doing overtime. I would take the carbon copy papers with me, and in order to make use of the time, because it did require time, during this one-hour journey I would be compiling the individual samizdats. One day, a gentleman took me by surprise in the train, I think it happened somewhere near Hlinsko. He stood up: ´What have you got here?´ But I don’t know who he was. I reacted swiftly – I used to play table tennis as a young man, and my reactions were thus quick. I quickly snatched the papers without giving him an opportunity to see them. But I don’t know what kind of man he was; it is hard to tell if he really could have hurt me, or if he was just some vagabond.”

  • “Apart from the samizdat which we were producing by retyping other samizdats, exile books or books which were precious because they had been printed but they were not available, a kind of more ´creative´ samizdat began to spread as well. We were receiving manuscripts from poets, prose writers, etc. or from their families, and we began retyping and copying them and giving them to our friends. A great number of books were copied this way. I remember that one of the first books was Reading about Jakub Deml by Ing. Olič. He gave it to me only for a limited time. He lived in Bratislava at that time and I had to return it to him very soon, and so every evening when I came home from work, I would place a board over the bathtub and place the typewriter on top, close all the doors so that I would not disturb my wife and children, and I start typing. Even now, my wife still remembers this as the time which she nearly liked more than the present times, when we watch television films instead. Naturally, this was also made in eight, nine, or ten copies. Many of these pages which I didn’t have time to bind have remained in my home. As a bookbinder’s son, I started binding the books. I still had the equipment. Dad had a cutting machine at home and some of the instruments he used for bookbinding. Gradually, I made it much easier: I ordered the copy paper pages and glued them at the spine. But this was not enough, this way the binding would break and the pages would fall apart. I used a drill to drill holes on the spine side and then bind the pages with a string which I still had from Dad. Later I came upon some nice grey-black folders; usually only the brown ones were available, and those were not too good-looking. I could glue all the pages into the folder, and then add a title on the book spine. At that time this was done by imprints. There were no computers yet, and imprinting was being done in the construction department and used for technical drawings. A letter would be imprinted onto the original and the whole title was written this way.”

  • “During the canonization mass for Blessed Agnes of Bohemia in the St Vitus cathedral we listened to cardinal Tomášek’s speech. It was a magnificent and unforgettable experience. There were young people from our town, too. The cathedral was packed, and cardinal Tomášek declared: ´The Church goes with the nation.´ People were ecstatic. You can actually see it in some television documents. In the afternoon after the mass we took a walk to Letná, where the massive demonstration took place. They said that there were nearly a million of people. Unfortunately we did not have enough time to stay there. We were there with an organized bus trip, and there were some older people with us as well. But we then listened to it on the radio which the driver had in the bus. We thus heard the protests on the radio.”

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    Holešov, 30.06.2014

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Hiddenness is one of the best gifts of life

František Rafaja
František Rafaja
zdroj: archiv Fr. Rafaji

František Rafaja was born October 15, 1943 in Holešov as the eldest of three sons. Both his parents were involved in the Orel sports organization and in amateur theatre. Family friends included priest Vojtěch Rygal, an Orel educator, who was shot at Easter 1948 when he was crossing the border near Aš, and Karel Bednařík (RAF pilot) who was also among the refugees and who was arrested at the border. František attended elementary school in Holešov, and after completing the eleven-year secondary school he began studying the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the University of Technology in Brno. He graduated in 1965 and he began working in the company Tesla in Valašské Meziříčí. One of the projects he participated on in the company‘s development department included the development of sound studio monitors for the Czechoslovak Radio and the Czechoslovak Television. In 1968 he joined the Czechoslovak People‘s Party (ČSL). During the occupation of Czechoslovakia in August of the same year he contributed to the broadcasting of the local radio station in Holešov which informed the citizens of the situation in the town and in the country. In the 1980s he became acquainted with several publishers of samizdat literature series (Kakost (Geranium) by Pavel Jungmann, Česká expedice (Czech Expedition) by Jaromír Hořec, Novoročenky pro přátele Jana Čepa (New Year Wishes for Friends of Jan Čep) by Mojmír Trávníček and Ladislav Šebela) and he began cooperating with them. Thanks to personal friendship with many of our silenced authors or with their relatives he managed to obtain a great number of precious works, translations and letters which became valuable contributions to the individual samizdat series. Later he also published some of these works in his own samizdat series titled FRH. As a faithful listener of Radio Free Europe since its beginnings, in the 1980s he became one of the radio‘s contributors to the annual readers‘ survey and under the alias František from Central Moravia he had several of his contributions broadcast. He happened to be in Prague when the protests in November 1989 broke out. When he returned home, he joined the newly formed Civic Forum in Holešov. He was one of the ČSL Party candidates in the subsequent election. In spring 1990 he organized an exhibition of samizdat and exile literature in Holešov, which was so successful that it was held again in Kroměříž. He worked in Tesla Valašské Meziříčí, and in its successor company TVM in the 1990s until his retirement. During his life he has published countless articles in the press and in specialized journals, focusing mainly on history, literature, and acoustics. In June 2014 his life-long publishing and cultural activities won him the highest award of the city of Holešov - Personality of the Holešov City for 2013. František Rafaja passed away on January, the 24th, 2024.