Jindřich Šídlo

* 1972

  • "There were quite amazing scenes at the Gymnasium on the Victory Plain, because we refused to go inside. The professors, because it was also the generation of our parents, yes, who were nervous about it, didn't know what to take from it, so they told us to go there and not fool around. Then director deputy, Mrs. Martínková, came from the subway. It was such a special school, the Gymnázium Na Vítězný plani, the children of prominent communists studied there side by side. In my class there was a very nice girl, by the way, she was very nice, Klára, who was the daughter of one of the ministers of the Czech government. And there were children who simply had parents, right, on the inside and so on. And on the other hand, the children of dissidents also studied there. Tereza Machoninová went to the same grade with us, Mária Procházková, who was the daughter of Ludvík Vaculík and Lenka Procházková, went a year lower. So, it kind of came together interestingly. And then there was this deputy director who kind of held it together. At that school, by the way, they taught people who had been kicked out of the Philosophical Faculty after 1968, and she said: 'Come on in, and we'll talk about it there.' Well, we went in, but we said that we weren't studying. And the professors took it seriously. So, we did not study, we missed a paper on Russian, which we were a little worried about, although I was not as I'm Russian, my mother is Russian too, so I always knew Russian well, back then. And we simply said that we are not studying, that we are on strike and that this is to protest the crackdown on students."

  • “Of course, I was not attacked, I only appeared there once. Now I don't know if it was Wednesday or Friday, well one of those days when the actions were very sharp. We went there, I think it was Friday, after school to have a look. Of course, our parents weren't allowed to know about it because they would have banned us, we were only sixteen, right. And I didn't see the intervention directly with my own eyes, because we are at the moment when the policemen or state police with those white shields and white helmets, they were nicknamed smurfs, by the way, according to the then very popular series on Czechoslovak TV, when they started to approach, so we ran away. The fact that the interventions were extremely harsh and illegal, often completely brutal, we learned gradually, on the one hand, from the radio stations and, of course, it was also written about in the Lidové noviny. But we found out about three weeks later.”

  • “And your uncle had a gallery. Have you attended any of his cultural events or do you remember one?" - "Sure, of course. He was or is the husband of my mother's sister, Zdenek Hůla, an academic sculptor. By the way, for example, the author of the monument in Lety near Písek, as a very important figure. And they and their brother had the first and only private gallery in the Czech Republic. Gallery H in Kostelec nad Černými lesy. So, I think from that end... people used to go there regularly, because such social and cultural events took place there, regular meetings, openings. It was the place where I saw Several Sentences for the first time, in June 1989. By the way, the events still take place there today, even though the gallery is actually no longer there, or not in the form it was in. So, at one time it was a very important place of fine arts and, I would say, of social life as well. I remember, for example, I was there at Christmas 1989, and the French ambassador was visiting at that time.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 29.11.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 52:38
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

We have decided to go on strike

Jindřich Šídlo as a student and speaker of the Grammar School on the Victory Plain, November 1989
Jindřich Šídlo as a student and speaker of the Grammar School on the Victory Plain, November 1989
zdroj: Záznam z ČST

Jindřich Šídlo was born on October 21, 1972 in Turnov, but grew up in Prague. He attended elementary school with extended language instruction, then continued at the Na Vítězné plani Gymnasium. He listened to the Voice of America radio station from the age of fourteen. In January 1989, he took part in a demonstration during Palach‘s Week, and in the summer, he signed the Several Sentences petition. He also regularly visited Gallery H in Kostelec nad Černými lesy, which was run by his uncle, academic painter Zdenek Hůla. It was the centre of not only cultural but also social events. On November 17, he took part in a meeting in Albertov and continued with the procession to Vyšehrad, where he disbanded. Subsequently, he and his classmates from the gymnasium decided to participate in a student strike, refusing to enter the school building and learn. He also became a strike spokesman. In the 1990s, he studied journalism at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University and worked for the magazine Respekt, where he focused mainly on the issue of racism. In 2022, he lived in Prague and worked as a journalist.