„There were seven of us, including the member of the tennis national team, Cventibold Černoch, and in the fourth year, we tore out the images of Gottwald and Stalin out of our textbooks. One of our classmates talked about it at home. His father was the head of the department of religion in the district council. And then they came to our class. I was not there that time because we had to go to cinema and I went there straight from home because we lived fifty metres from the cinema and five hundred metres from the school. So, I came to the cinema and there was nobody from our class. I asked: ‘Where are they?’ ‘Erm, something has happened. Everyone is in school.’ Unsuspecting, I went to school, I entered our classroom and there were two guys from the secret police. Miss Balcárková, who taught us Czech and history was red in her face because the cops slapped her and we all had to show our textbooks. We showed them and obviously, they found out that seven pupils’ books are missing those pictures. We kept inventing excuses. ‘We needed it for the notice board.’ They banned us from further studies at secondary schools. Miss Balcárková was fired, the headmaster was fired. That was my first encounter with the State Security but they did not beat us, only the teachers.”
„One day, I woke up on the 21th of August, it was my birthday, I heard the hum of the airplane engines, I turn the radio on and suddenly, we have this brotherly help which arrived during the night. Those were the Soviet [sic] armies. In Olomouc, those were Polish. So I wrote all over the main square that the Azbuks go home. Azbuks are people who use Cyrilic [azbuka both in Russian and in Czech] for writing. It read things like ‘Moscow, 2500 kilometres’ and so on. And obviously, it was filmed. I was not in the Communist party so I was kicked out during the first round, along with the participants of the Vysočany meeting [Meeting of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia which denounced the invasion; the whole meeting and its proceedings was later ruled invalid]. I did not go the normalisation interviews and background checks, I just said that I was not going to recant, that those are invasion armies and that’s it. So I went out and I had no job. Future of manual work was looming over me, obviously. At the time, the construction of the Prior shopping centre was beginning so I applied there. Nobody wanted the job because it was badly paid but I had to provide for my family, I had two small children. So I started my job there and the director told me: ‘Milan, we know that you painted those slogans on the square so behave accordingly.’”
„And I was here, when there was a demonstration in support of the students beaten at the Národní Street [in Prague]. I went there with my first daughter and we stood in front of the theatre. There were all sorts of speeches and suddenly, the current district state attorney asked for the microphone and he said that the demonstration is not permitted and that he demand that we disperse. I’d wager that there were around five thousand people between the theatre and the city hall and we were surrounded by policemen with loaded submachine guns. Or that’s what they claimed. I got cheesed up and shouted that they hand me the chair. So they gave me a chair, I climbed on it, I got the microphone and I asked the state attorney: ‘Comrade Attorney, could I ask you a few questions? But, please, answer frankly, not in the dialectic-materialistic manner, but just Yes, No, I don’t know.’
He was silent for a while. ‘Yes.’
‘Mr. Attorney, when Lenin was making the October Revolution which was in November in Saint Petersburg, did he have a permission from the tsar to make a revolution? Yes or no?’ ‘No.’
‘So, you see, this demonstration is not permitted, we have no tsar here. But nobody is going to ban it.’
There was a storm of clapping and cheers and that’s how I got noticed and soon, they invited me to Národní dům [National House, a hotel with a ballroom where some of the events of the revolution were held].
"In Slavičín, I witnessed the biggest air battle that ever happened in Czech Republic. Twenty-eight dead Americans, Canadians and Englishmen, seven airplanes shot down. I saw it with my own eyes. I saw how two of the German Stuka fighters (*) shoot down the [Allies'] airplanes and then mercilessly shoot at the pilots that had jumped out Ýon parachutes. I saw how they lead the captured airmen, because some landed and lived, how they march through Slavičín. We lined the street in silence. They were taken to the barrracks where my father served.”
(*) Note: it was not the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka that took part in the battle, those were slow bombardiers. The planes were mainly Messerschmitt Bf-109 G, and some Focke-Wulf Fw-190
Milan Stejskal, né Köhler, was born on the 21th of August in 1936 in Brno. During the WWII, he lived in Slavičín on the foot of the White Carpathians where he witnessed the air batttle and burial of 28 U. S. airmen. During the last year of primary school which he was attending in Olomouc, he and his six classmates spontaneously tore out the images of Stalin and [Czechoslovak president of the Stalinist era] Gottwald, which resulted in disagreeable dossier. Despite that, he managed to be accepted to the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the Brno University of Technology which he graduated with outstanding grades. After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies, he painted protest slogans all over the Upper Square in Olomouc and disturbed the meeting of the Union for Czechoslovak – Soviet Friendship which resulted in him being fired from his job in a road maintenance company. As a construction engineer, he participated in the construction of the hockey hall in Olomouc, six Prior shopping centres, in reconstructions of many historical buildings and in other notable projects.
For several years, he was the head of the construction cooperative, Construction Workshop. During the Velvet Revolution, he gave a speech in support of the revolution on the Upper Square. After the fall of Communist régime and after the construction coop was privatised, he started his own business which he ran for fifteen years. He is still active in his field by 2021 but he prefers working for non-profit and charitable organisations.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
![Milan Stejskal in tke mask of Krakonoš [a mountain spirit]. Petříkov, 1984](https://www.pametnaroda.cz/sites/default/files/2021-03/Milan%20Stejskal%20jako%20Krakono%C5%A1%20v%20roce%201984%20v%20Pet%C5%99%C3%ADkov%C4%9B.jpg)
