Vladimír Zeman

* 1946

  • “The next question was: ‘Why is it not possible for there to be a coup here?’ I thought about it for a long time... Why couldn’t there be a coup here? And then he helped me our and said: ‘Well, because we have a people’s army, of course, right! We have a people’s army, so the people would stop it and there couldn’t be any coup.’”

  • “When I was in my sixth year or so at school, Dad would occasionally send us a parcel from America. One time he sent each of us some clothes. My brother and I got jeans and a shirt. I had jeans, and no one had those here yet. He’d also send us chewing gum, which we didn’t have otherwise. So I had jeans and a brutally chequered shirt... The trousers had a belt with a horseshoe buckle and a cowboy hat on the other end of the belt. We got it in the spring, and then it was May Day. I dressed up in that and went to join the school parade. I came to the school, and I was forbidden from joining the parade. They told me I couldn’t go dressed like that. So I stood on the pavement and waved to all my classmates from there.”

  • “My mum asked for a reduced sentence, so they shortened it to thirteen years. She did eight and a half of them. They arrested her before I started primary school, and when I was ending my eighth year, they released her in May by amnesty. We visited her all those years. She was imprisoned in Pardubice, and we travelled to Pardubice all those years to visit her. It was pretty ugly to begin with. I must say it was pretty rough for me. Because when we visited her to begin with, we weren’t allowed close to her at all. There was a kind of counter there. The room was divided up, there was a screen there, and we looked at each other through that screen. We couldn’t even touch hands. We could only talk, that’s how it was. It wasn’t until later that the partition was removed and we could sit with her at a table, and sometimes I was even allowed to sit in Mum’s lap.”

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    Semily, 04.11.2016

    (audio)
    délka: 01:23:10
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
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Cherish your freedom, it can be lost even in democracy!

img018 - Kopie.jpg (historic)
Vladimír Zeman
zdroj: archiv pamětníka a natáčení PNS

Vladimír Zeman was born on 1 September 1946. All his closest relatives were active in the resistance during World War II. Of his grandparents, only his grandmother from his mother‘s side avoided execution. His father Josef Zeman escaped after being arrested by the Gestapo and had to hide. After the war he was appointed chairman of the district committee in Jilemnice and was politically active in the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party. However, with two months of custody and the threat of long-term imprisonment following the Communist coup in February 1948, he was forced to emigrate. He became a „walker“ agent and would cross over the borders into Czechoslovakia on intelligence missions. However, he was not able to get his family out of the country because they were kept under State Security surveillance. When his network of contacts was betrayed, he stayed abroad and later received asylum in the United States of America. In 1952 the witness‘s mother Marie Zemanová, née Kodejšová, was sent before a Communist tribunal and sentenced to eighteen years of prison in the trial with Václav Lampa et al. Vladimír Zeman grew up with his siblings and his grandmother, later at his aunt‘s. He remembers having a poor but nice childhood. But he missed his mother, and this sorrow was only overcome thanks to his close relationship with his sister and brother. Marie Zemanová was released by an amnesty in 1960. None of her three children were allowed to study university, the authorities only permitted them to enrol in selected vocational programmes with maturita graduation exams. The witness trained as an electrician and worked in the field until his retirement.