Petr Šulák

* 1960

  • "There was this sort of square in the middle of the pub. There was raised seating around it, and the publican would pull in this big trolley. He had pints in it, and he would just fire them off to all sides. It was just a watering place, nothing else. It could take so many miners in there. It was huge. They opened in the morning; it was like round-the-clock. They only closed for a few of hours to clean up because the night shift miners would come in again in the morning, just running in."

  • "Why did they murder Milada Horáková? Why did they murder our airmen from England? Because they were such people. Psychopaths. The worst scum of our nation who murdered our heroes. That's the way it was. They were brutes. Of course, it wasn't the same in the 1980s like we knew it had been in the 1950s." - "Do you think people like that are still around?" - "I think they are in every nation. Just assume the regime changes, and you'll have plenty of them. They say the psychopaths amount to one percent. There are smart psychopaths, then there are psychopaths who can't do it... and those would become the cops."

  • "Have you ever wondered about the motivation of the guys who threatened you with a home search, hinting that your wife might have an abortion in the process? Have you ever wondered what made them act that way?" - "That's easy. It's the way they exerted pressure. They did it routinely. The StB were not normal cops, they were monsters. They weren't people. I don't even think of them as people. They tortured other people and they were the worst monsters there were. They were mostly psychopaths. I don't care why they did it. They just benefited from it. They did it for the benefits. For the money. For all that socialism brought them."

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    Ostrava, 23.08.2025

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - Moravskoslezský kraj
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    Ostrava, 24.08.2025

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - Moravskoslezský kraj
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He hated school. In class, he stared out the window, just like in the interrogation

Petr Šulák
Petr Šulák
zdroj: Petr Šulák's archive

Petr Šulák was born in Krnov on 14 June 1960 to Irena Šuláková and Pavel Šulák. He spent the first six years of his life in Bohušov the Osoblaha area to where his paternal grandparents had moved from Wallachia after the war. He first went to school in Ostrava. He suffered from dyslexia, faced issues at school and acquired a dislike for teachers and school. He did not finish his printer apprenticeship in Olomouc. During his military service in Tachov, he rehearsed for the 1980 Spartakiad. Back from the military, he switched various jobs. His longest stint was as a chimney sweep. In 1988 he met dissident Petr Pospíchal from Brno. He signed Charter 77, distributed the Infoch samizdat and worked with the East European Information Agency. He was regularly detained and interrogated by state security. He faced threats, intimidation and pressure to cooperate. In the early 1990s he left Ostrava for Šumava. He received a certificate of participation in the 3rd Resistance. He lived as a retiree in Volary at the time of filming in 2025.