"I met Bohdan Mikolášek [in Linz], an émigré living with his wife in Switzerland. His wife Jana is also a very interesting person and is an evangelical minister. Bohdan is a singer-songwriter especially famous for his beautiful song 'Silence' inspired by Jan Palach. Bohdan came to me and gave me an LP record and told he he had recorded it in Switzerland and wanted me to take it to Czechia, so that it could be copied and distributed. Several émigrés witnessed this. I took the record and drove my Škoda 120 from Linz to Czechia. Just before reaching the border, I had this unusually strong intuition telling me not to take the record with me. I stopped and leaned it against a pole by a billboard. It happened to say 'Stop Temelin, we don't want atomic energy'. I was stopped by the customs at the border and had to get out. They searched my luggage and my car, actually taking the seats out and searching literally every part. I was absolutely sure they knew I had the record with me."
"I was in the military at the turn of 1979 and 1980. I was in Janovice nad Úhlavou, one of the worst units in the country. People who were highly politically unreliable served there. I found out that I was labelled politically unreliable after breaking into the vault with others like me when I was on duty as a guard supervisor. That could earn us court martial. We broke in to read our files. My file said said I was never be allowed to study in Prague. There were sentences underlined in red saying our family had owned factories and so on. I was an utter villain. Everything was wrong about me. I eventually got into the Faculty of Education in Hradec Králové. First, it wasn't in Prague, and also there was a shortage of teachers, so they admitted me. Then I applied to HAMU in Prague again - and without success again. Since I knew from my secret file that I had no chance in Prague, I applied to the Janáček Academy in Brno and was admitted. That was in 1983 when things were beginning to warm up and this stuff was not taken so seriously and literally."
"Here is an interesting story from [my grandfather's] Trans-Siberian anabasis. They were staying on Lake Baikal over the winter, and he went to play with a string quartet in a nearby village where there was a school. The schoolmaster founded a string quartet, my grandfather joined and fell in love with his daughter Nadezhda. As a soldier, he couldn't stay overnight and went back to the base. One day, the Bolsheviks raided the village and masscared all the villagers. My grandfather went there the next day and saw all his friends, including Nadezhda, dead. He found a viola that miraculously survided amidst the burned ruins. He took it home with him. He was a very good musician, and he continued to play it. When he met my grandmother and they got married and had their first daughter, my aunt, my grandfather insisted on naming her Nadezhda, after his love from Baikal. My grandmother still had a hard time dealing with this years later."
Jan Jirásek was born in Rychnov nad Kněžnou on 9 January 1955 to Alena Jirásková and Jan Jirásek. He wanted to pursue composition from an early age. His grandfather Břetislav Eichler joined the Czechoslovak legions in Russia when he escaped from captivity during World War I. His grandmother’s sister Marie Kronowetterová founded a leather goods factory in Rychnov nad Kněžnou. She kept the factory during World War II and bravely protected her employees from forced deployment. The witness’s father, an economist, was preparing to take over the business. The plans were thwarted by the February 1948 coup, which resulted in the communists expropriating the family’s plants. After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, his father had to leave his high position for good. After primary school, Jan Jirásek enrolled in grammar school in Rychnov nad Kněžnou in 1970 and privately prepared for admission exams to the Music Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (HAMU). However, due to his cadre profile, he was not admitted into his dream university. Following his mandatory military service in Janovice nad Úhlavou, he completed the Faculty of Education (1979) and entered the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts (JAMU) in Brno in the early 1980s, majoring in composition. He worked as a music director and dramaturge at the Czechoslovak Radio in Hradec Králové and then as an editor of the contemporary classical music section in Prague. He and his wife Dáša raised children Lukáš and Klára. They were preparing for emigration but did not leave the country eventually because the totalitarian regime was ended by the Velvet Revolution. During the revolution, he became one of the spokesmen for Czechoslovak Radio. After 1989 he finally got the opportunity to perform his compositions. Since then, his works have been performed on many international stages and festivals. Jan Jirásek has written several successful operas, and was lecturing on composition to students from all over the world at the time of the recording. He has also been involved in film music, winning Czech Lion awards. He was living with his wife Vladislava near Prague at the time of the filming of 2024 and spent his free time in his native region at their cottage.
