Vladimír Herman

* 1955

  • “There were about fifteen or twenty of us in Meziříčí, the harder sort [of dissidents]. We were almost, almost, I would say, Charter 77 signatories. And we visited each other, copied various articles [of the Charter], I don't know how it exactly went but I still have piles of that stuff at home. We distributed it among ourselves, you know.” “Did you spread it further on, among other people?” “No, I was probably scared. I only, to those whom I trusted, I only gave it. I brought it to about a hundred of persons.” “How it actually worked, distribution of that and the whole, in fact, illegal activity? In the sense of… did they found out or do you know some story from around, about someone who got arrested?” “Um, well. I was lucky a few times. I just happened to be at Čechura's when the secret police stormed in. And I hid under the bed, like, you know. It worked out this time. I slept there under the bed a few times before I dared to go out. They took him for interrogation a few times, for no reasons, sure. But that they would catch someone red-handed? No, not that, nope. We were quite careful.”

  • “So… we agreed that we would go the following day because they jailed Zukal, for prevention. So we said among ourselves, we will go protest on the square the next day. Then it started to spread among people so some five hundred folks arrived. We went away from the square. Zukal's wife had a speech there and she said that Vítek was preemtively arrested for no reason and that the cops hold him in custody at the station. So we went from that square to the police station and there were about eight hundred of us. And now we required that they let him go, I mean. So we yelled and clapped and whistled. And they really let him go! I just stared in disbelief. At that time, I told to myself that now, now we will probably win.”

  • "People liked them! They used to go to the pub, the soldiers lived in barracks a kilometre away. They went to the coop [United Agricultural Cooperative] and they slaughtered pigs and partied [pig slaughter is a specific tradition which includes processing the whole pig into various products; it also involves a social gathering and some drinking], it was terrible. And everyone was friends with them, I mean the communists. The chairman of the coop, they slaughtered the pigs, there was booze, such were the times. This was not the problem. We used to go there as boys, when were fourteen or so, a year later we went to meet the soldiers. But... it caused a definite, definite, like, distaste of Communism.”

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    Prlov, 03.07.2019

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Everyone needs to find a way how to live their life

Vladimír Herman was born on the 18th November in 1955 into a family of teachers. His father Arnošt Herman was the Headmaster of the basic school in Bynina where the family lived. Until he was thirteen, Vladimír Herman was not aware that he was living in a totalitarian state. His father was a sincere Communist but during the night, he used to listen to the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. Vladimir considered it hypocrisy and he started to think about the ruling regime more critically. When he was still at the basic school, he discovered the Western culture. He loved to listen to Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd. In 1970, he started to study at the secondary technical school in Vsetín and he met schoolmates with similar opinions which made him realise that he would never be able to accept the Communist party and regime. The breakthrough point was a meeting with Jaromír Čechura, a dissident from Valašské Meziříčí. They, along with other people, copied anticommunist flyers and retyped samizdat texts. After 1977, Vladimír Herman distributed copies of the Charter 77 but he was afraid to sign it. He signed a later document, Several Sentences. As a great fan of Western music, he organised rock music disco parties in Valašské Meziříčí and surrounding villages. In 1989, he and his wife participated at the Festival of Czechoslovak Independent Culture in Wroclaw in Poland. During the revolution, he joined the budding Civic Forum and when the Civic Democratic Party was established, he immediately became a member. After several years he started to feel discontent with frauds and scandals and he chose to leave the party with the feeling that the “old structures”, the people who had held their offices before the Velvet Revolution, have kept their posts in the state administrations.