Jaromír Moravec

* 1955

  • “All my life I've been trying to recover what the previous regime had destroyed.”

  • “Today I feel no relief. I've been to Wenceslas Square, I've been to Letná. And I feel no relief and I keep telling myself, 'Here I am again after thirty years and why? Where did we get to? And as I can see where we are all heading, that no one cares who our representatives are, I am just sick of it.”

  • “I was a bit disappointed. As I got engaged in this, I told myself that I couldn't allow my children to ask me one day: 'What have you been doing when the situation needed you to do something?' So this was also a thing that kept me going, apart from the fact that I wanted to get rid of communism once for all.”

  • “Back then, we used to wear a ribbon in national colours. I went on a bus to Jedlová where I had been working and I had this ribbon pinned to my coat, and there were quite many people on the bus who would just keep staring at me as if I was some kind of a pariah. That's a thing I remember quite well, yet I had prevailed.”

  • “This gang of maintenance men from Polička took over the mill and they had been operating it for about a year. They ended their stay there by shredding two freight cars of pure salt. When my father saw this, he went to see their boss and asked him whether they knew what they were doing. He told him that everything would be cleaned and it would be just fine. But that wasn't the case. When they left the mill, everything got rusty. As salt absorbs water, so even the nails in the floor get rusty.”

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    Polička, 30.09.2020

    (audio)
    duration: 02:13:42
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - HRK REG ED
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His whole life he has been trying to preserve the family mill which had been taken over by the communists who had turned it into a ruin

His father, Jaromír (second child from the right) and his brother, Jiří, in the 1960s
His father, Jaromír (second child from the right) and his brother, Jiří, in the 1960s
photo: Archiv pamětníka

Jaromír Moravec was born on 24 July 1955 in Polička. For several generations his family had been operating a mill in the village of Bystré u Poličky. In 1950, the mill had been taken over by the newly established communist state and had been serving as a depot where cattle fodder was being prepared. As a former owner his father had been hired by the coop as a regular employee. The family had been allowed to use the habitable part of the mill. In 1959, both their land and forest had been nationalised by the Communist government. Jaromír Moravec trained as an auto mechanic. Above all, he took an interest in the Czech tramping movement, an activity that offered him a temporary refuge from life in an unfree society. In the early 80s, huge amounts of salt had been processed at the mill which resulted in a gradual corrosion of the machinery. Jaromír kept trying to save the family mill from being totally devastated. During the Velvet Revolution he joined the Civic Forum branch in Bystré, later joining the Civic Democratic Party. He fought for years to get back his family possessions. In 2020 he had been living in the restored building of the mill that his family managed to get back.