When I look back I’m proud I managed to resist the regime within the bounds of possibility
Download image
Zdeněk Hrubý was born March 10, 1951. In 1968 he joined the then newly established Union of the Czech-Moravian Countryside Youth ‘Juvena’. Members of the group managed to interfere the meeting of diehard communists with Soviet generals in October 1968 in Břeclav or to ridicule the May Day decorations in 1969. In 1972 he was on trial for allegedly threatening the local communists with death but eventually got away with a suspended sentence that was subsequently cancelled in 1974. The State Security kept a file on him since he was eighteen, labeling him an enemy of the state. He signed the Charter 77 declaration in January 1989 via the Charter’s then spokesperson Tomáš Hradílek. He later got in touch with other dissidents, mainly with Jaroslav Šabata. He brought the ‘Několiv vět’ petition to Břeclav in the summer of 1989. He learned about the November 17 events from foreign media outlets. Afterwards he joined the demonstrations in Brno and in Břeclav. After consulting Jaroslav Šabata he also initiated the establishment of a local cell of the Civic Forum. He also helped organize the happening ‘Hands of Europe’ – a human chain several kilometers long that went to the Austrian border, where people then crossed the former Iron Curtain en masse. Zdeněk Hrubý remained active in politics, he was at the birth of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party. He had been a member of the ČSSD party until 1999.
