Pavel Křivka

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Pavel Křivka was born on June 12, 1960 in Pardubice. After graduating from high school, he studied at the agricultural college in Halle an der Saale in the then German Democratic Republic. He graduated in 1984, returned to Czechoslovakia and became a museum collections manager at the Museum of Homeland History in Jičín. In addition, he also held the position of environmental officer. Pavel Křivka was intensely interested in ecology, he was critical and above all open about the state of the environment in the Czechoslovakia. On a public and by then neglected bulletin board in one of Jičín’s streets, he posted materials on New Year’s Eve 1984 that ironized the complete formality of nature protection at that time. They included a criticism of land reclamation and a map of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, which Křivka’s friend from his studies, Ing. Pavel Škoda, a friend of Křivka’s, Pavel Škoda, added altered names of Czech and Moravian mountain ranges and regions (Raketová špičatina, Rakovinoše, Česko-Moravská melioratina). The board was soon officially torn down and confiscated, and Křivka was questioned by the police for the first time. He was systematically monitored by the State Security Service because of his correspondence with ecologists from Federal Germany. One of them visited Křivka in April 1985. When he left, Křivka went on a trip to eastern Slovakia with Pavel Škoda and two other friends. State Security officers accompanied the young men, and Křivka was arrested during the trip on April 29, taken to a detention centre in Hradec Králové and charged with damaging the interests of the Republic abroad. He was alleged to have committed this offence by criticising the protection of nature in Czechoslovakia in letters to Germany. State Security was unable to prove the accusations and after several searches they reclassified them. They found at ing. Pavel Křivka a two-year-old parody of Jakub Jan Ryba’s Czech Christmas Mass. With the discovery of the parody mocking President Husák, Křivka’s classmate from Halle, ing. Pavel Škoda from Prague and was summoned to Bartolomějská for questioning as a witness. In 1982, Křivka initiated the re-wording of the “Rybovka”, Škoda took on the task and together they sang the song several times to the amusement of his classmates. When State Security officers discovered this during interrogations of former students, they accused Škoda of sedition and Křivka of subverting the republic. Křivka was sentenced to three years without parole, while Pavel Škoda received 20 months. They appealed the sentence, but on 13 and 14 February 1986 the Supreme Court heard their appeals and rejected them. Ing. Pavel Křivka was transferred from detention to Plzeň-Bory prison and released in 1987. When he came out of prison, he worked as a labourer and became involved in opposition environmental activities. From 1990 to 1992 he worked at the Ministry of the Environment. Since the early 1990s he has worked as a translator and interpreter from Dutch and German. In 1995 he completed a postgraduate degree in environmental protection at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. He was awarded as a participant in the anti-communist resistance.