Zbyněk Plesar

* 1950

  • "Of course she had witnessed this, when the Germans gathered and they would lay siege to our paratroopers. So she told me about it - all the horror and the shooting and they were in school. And even the school authorities were terrified to let them go home, so they released them one by one until evening. They were afraid to just open the school up, as the children would come out and those idiots would start shooting at them. So she told me how horrible it was and what she saw. But, on the other hand, and all her life she was quite nonpartisan, she also experienced the American bombing, where the Americans mistook Prague for Dresden. That was another horror she said – the molten asphalt flowed like a river, the houses and people were on fire. And those little German bastards , the Hitler Youth, had been rescuing Czech people from their homes in quite an orderly manner."

  • "And as we were walking past [the statue of] Wenceslas, the [People's] Militia had already been there, those bastards. We went down the square and I thought, shit, maybe it's going to be quite rough here. But as we went down, there were crowds of people, they were gathering under the balcony. For the first time, Kovář brought in people from Vysočany in such numbers, factory workers. Before that it was just a civil disobedience, but on that day he brought them for the first time. So it was really uplifting when all of a sudden this crowd, this procession emerged [from Na Příkopě Street]. They had been organised, with banners and all, as I guess they knew how to do this from all those May Day [parades]. They showed up and it was just like 'Hurrah!' This huge mass of people. So you would feel elated.”

  • "They were guarding [the statue of] St. Wenceslas because people started to bring candles there, so they just sealed off the area. They were doing this several days in a row. The police had been there all the time, crowds of people gathered around them and on the sidewalks. And we were throwing stuff at them – everyone was trying to hit at least one policeman. 'A dime for a sandwich' [as people said], deeming them traitors of the nation. And every now and then some brave policeman would run out and spray people with tear gas. And it also happened that the boys would just grab him and spray the gas right in his face.”

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Bystřice pod Hostýnem, 02.10.2020

    (audio)
    duration: 01:19:14
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Bystřice pod Hostýnem, 06.10.2020

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    duration: 01:21:19
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
  • 3

    Bystřice pod Hostýnem, 09.10.2020

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    duration: 01:36:38
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
  • 4

    Bystřice pod Hostýnem, 12.10.2020

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    duration: 03:13:03
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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I didn’t fraternize with communists, so I didn’t know their stories

Zbyněk Plesar at a draft board, 1960s
Zbyněk Plesar at a draft board, 1960s
photo: archiv pamětníka

Zbyněk Plesar was born on 2 April 1950 in Hradec Králové to Zbyněk and Jarmila, née Poláková. Together with his younger sister, he had been raised in the anti-communist spirit – his mother’s family had been labeled bourgeois and lost its property after 1948; his paternal uncle Otakar ended up in prison in the 1950s for ‘illegal activities’ within the Junák Organisation banned at that time. Zbyněk grew up in the Žižkov district of Poděbrady and later studied in Prague. Since his childhood he showed artistic talent, so under the guidance of his father, who was a furniture maker, he enrolled at the Secondary School of Arts and Crafts (SUPŠ) in Prague. In Prague, Zbyněk witnessed the August 1968 invasion and the protests that took place during the following year. After graduating, he went through a series of jobs – from being employed at the Libeň shipyards and the Czechoslovak State Railways car repair company in Nymburk to working at the company Interiéry Praha and finally landing at TON in Bystřice pod Hostýnem. In 1974, he married Zdena (daughter of Vojtěch Bubílek, a liaison officer of the Allied Command in England during the Second World War) and they settled in Bystřice. Zbyněk’s job became his destiny for years to come, and in a solid career progression he rose from a technologist and a production manager to the position of the CEO of TON, which he became in the early 1990s. Under his direction, the company underwent a transformation and later became a public limited company. He was involved in the Velvet Revolution in Prague and Bystřice pod Hostýnem, where he became a founding member of the Civic Forum. After leaving the management of TON, he started his own business in the late 1990s. In 2021 he was living in Bystřice pod Hostýnem.