Zdenek Zukal

* 1954

  • "My mother's entire family came from Vienna. And in August 1968 it was somehow possible to go there. We wnt with my grandmother, who had a sister there. It was about a week before the 21st of August. And on the 20th of August, we went back home. Everyone told us: 'Don't go, the Russians will occupy the country.' We laughed and said, why should our best friends occupy us? We got home, and after one night’s sleep the Russians were already in Olomouc. It was a shock. We lived in a house on Náměstí Hrdinů (The Heroes’ Square) that had a shop that sold cars and motorcycles at the bottom and there were statues at the top. It used to be the Czechoslovak or Insurance Bank. The original inscription was still visible. The Russians must have thought it was a bank, so they set up a cannon opposite our house, on the corner of Riegrova Street, that was aimed directly at our windows on the fourth floor."

  • "My mother didn't want to let me go anywhere, but of course I ran out onto the square with my friends. Armored vehicles came down Riegrova Street. People, students and everyone else surrounded them. They [the Russians] got scared and shot several times in the air. We all kind of scattered away. I have quite a strong memory of the fact that when the Russians arrived, they were scared, too. Of course, we were scared too when they started shooting."

  • “Every night we had to watch the communist news. It was also possible to get German television. We watched German adds for about two minutes. There was some foam and half-naked women bathing. Two tents full of horny blokes roared with excitement. But they turned it into group watching of western television. The kontráši [members of the military counter-intelligence service] arrived and interrogated us one by one. They threatened that we would be expelled from school and that we would have to do two years of military service instead of one.”

  • “It was a part of everyday life. Russian cars were still all around town. You kept an eye on them. You didn't know what the person in the GAZ car would do, because they were considered special. It was said that they drove like animals. Some people made business them. And they also had two 'department stores', where you went to buy their goods. They created a kind of Russian Tuzex. You would see their bosses covered with medals at all events. When you saw them on the street, you would cross to the other side of the road. No one wanted to confront them. It was known that they had some missiles in Libavá. You could feel their presence like danger in the air.”

  • "I came to give an explanation at court. But the police told me that I was under arrest. I couldn’t understand it at all. They handcuffed me, took away my shoelaces, my necklace, probably so I wouldn't hang myself. And they took me to court to decide if I should be taken into custody. Fortunately, I managed to give a sign to some acquaintances. Journalists arrived. Pavel Dostál was there, who was then already a member of parliament. And it all started to get media coverage. Železný from the TV-channel Nova also stood up for me. But it was a terrible feeling. They were telling me that they wanted to send me to Mírov Prison, because it had a pre-trial detention centre and the conditions were worse there. I didn't know what was going to happen. I felt like crying. I was mentally broken. During communist times nothing had happened to me, and now they were leading me like a sheep to be slaughtered.”

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    Olomouc, 10.05.2018

    (audio)
    délka: 03:03:08
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I was happy when the communist regime fell. In the 1990s, I felt disillusioned

Zdenek Zukal / Olomouc / 2018
Zdenek Zukal / Olomouc / 2018
zdroj: E.D.

Zdenek Zukal was born on the 23rd of September 1954 in Olomouc. His mother worked as a shop assistant, his father was a radio operator for the Czechoslovak Navy. He graduated from the Secondary School for Film in Čimelice. He studied cultural theory at the Faculty of Arts at the Palacký University in Olomouc and later worked for the audio-visual centre of the university. In November and December 1989, he joined the anti-communist protests. He recorded dozens of hours of video footage of strikes, demonstrations, and of students and actors on strike visiting factories and villages in the region. Thanks to his video-journalism he spread the news of events linked to the revolution. In 1993, he founded his own television studio and started supplying private television channels with news coverage from his region. Charges were held against him for falsely accusing police officers in connection to a series of news reports he had made on the so-called Olomouc Affair. He was not convicted.