Jaromír Plíšek

* 1955

  • “...If you know the Biblical book of Daniel, there’s a king there called Nebuchadnezzar, and from time to time throughout his reign he would declare that whenever the trumpets were to sound throughout the land, that his people should come and bow before a statue of the king made of gold and silver. And whoever would not bow, he would be thrown into the fiery furnace... Read the Book of Daniel, it’s a nice book, and it fits perfectly to the working principle of a totalitarian regime. The elections under Communism weren’t election at all, but just this sounding of trumpets, when all the citizens of the state were to go bow before the statue. There was no one to elect, all the representatives and functionaries had been chosen long before somewhere within the Communist Party. And the people were merely to show loyalty to the regime by coming there, refusing to go behind the screen to hide who they voted for, but instead to manifest, so to say, by taking the envelope that they gave you, which contained the right names and the right parties, in actual fact there was just one, and by putting it into the ballot box before the eyes of the committee - they would tick the box that ‘František Vonásek remains loyal.’ The turnout was 99,9 per cent, and those who dared to not go to the elections, those were individual people and they were asking, pardon my Czech, for a shitload of trouble, that was almost like running someone over with a car, the Communists were capable of locking you up for that under some pretence or other.”

  • “Nowadays, I can see one critical issue, which is that I think that the societies to the north-west of us (Germany, Holland, Sweden) contain a certain tendency towards correctness and transparency, I don’t want to idealise it, but I’m speaking from my own experience, even when dealing with governments officials. And then there’s another kind of mentality, which I’ve given the working title ‘South-east-I-don’t-know-what’, which has its own charm, but it isn’t correct or transparent, and it’s based on clan structures. And human societies generally seem to tend towards such clan structures. And the downside of these clan structures is that they disadvantage the weaker members of society... And when I look at things from this schematic perspective, then I see that the Communists formed a kind of clan, and then put into Section 4 of the constitution that this clan will rule forever, they propped it up with some ideology, and that was that. And now we freed ourselves from that, and this one Communist clan has been replaced by multiple power clans, all those connections between political parties and economic entities, and government officials are in a muddle with all this... And what I’d really like is for this society to come to some kind of understanding that what we’re building here after the fall of Communism, the direction we’re headed, is a society which keeps to laws and correct rules, that if someone drives a car and he’s drunk and he runs someone over, then it doesn’t matter if he’s member of parliament or a common man, it doesn’t matter if he belongs to this or that clan, or if his name’s Janoušek, for example [referring to a recent prominent case when a Mr Janoušek with powerful connections ran over a woman while apparently drunk and avoided being punished for it - trans.]. And that there’s a law that punishes such deeds. And that it should be inconceivable for it to matter what connections the person has or which political party he’s in or how much money he has. And my experience is that people like talking about it, that they think we live in such a society, that we want to live in such a society and that we’re working to create it, but it happens to them, everyone gladly uses whatever connections he’s got. Regardless of what the law states, what the civil service law is like, the public tenders law... when society in general accepts that tenders are awarded to friends and that the ‘clever’ ones know how to distribute public funding to their advantage, then it hardly even matters what the law states because if society doesn’t have the will to keep the rules no matter who it affects... Sorry for ending my reflection on totality in this way, but I feel it’s practically the most important thing at the moment, so we’re not dispirited in our journey towards that correctly organised society, where the same law is applied regardless of party membership and social status. And what’s making me nervous in the last two years, since our new president took up office, to be precise, is that I have the feeling it’s getting worse. Not just that things are the way they are now, that we’re not closer to the ‘North-west’ mentally, but that we’re slowly moving back in the direction that we wanted to escape from.”

  • “These small problems started building up, and my military service was coming to an end, and I remember that one day I said to myself: I’ll go to the elections. I don’t have the strength any more, seeing how things are here. They’d lock me up, they’d find some excuse to stand me before a military tribunal for sedition, they’d find some excuse. So I agreed to myself to have the following stance: I wouldn’t try to make excuses, I wouldn’t tell myself it didn’t matter, that there was no difference. There was a difference, and it did matter. But I’ll go because I’m afraid. And if someone asks me why I went, I’ll tell that it’s because I’m afraid, I won’t make any pretences.”

  • “Of course, I remember Palach’s days, they were... sad. After taking that breath. As a growing boy I mostly remember the emotional side of the matter, first that breath of air in sixty-eight, and then having it all crushed, the way people resigned themselves to it, acquiesced, bent their backs and lost all their spark. I think that was one of the worst things to ever happen to devastate our society. I can’t compare it with the Fifties, I don’t remember those. The brutality wasn’t physical, but it was bad mentally.”

  • “I didn’t want to do military service, of course, few people did. A friend of mine said that military service was boot camp for life under totality, that the system would swallow you up and there was no escaping it. People tried to get what was called the Blue Book, which was confirmation that the person really can’t do military service for health reasons. But few people managed to get that, either you had to be really ill, or have amazingly good connections. But the vast majority of us were drafted. Military service was for two years, but university students had a different system, from about the third year we attended what was called the military department, that is, once a week instead of school we went for military training at Motol here in Prague. Then over the holidays perhaps before the last year of school there was a month-long military training session, that was pretty unpleasant, we had to lob grenades, for example. I’m not good even at throwing stones, so it was difficult for me. But no one liked being there. Later on, graduates only had to do one year, so it was easier, but not necessarily and not always.”

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I didn’t have the oxygen to resist any more

Fron the witnesses archive
Fron the witnesses archive
photo: Archiv pamětníka

Ing. Jaromír Plíšek was born on 20 May 1955. He grew up on the outskirts of Prague, in Bílá hora. His father was a technical engineer, his mother suffered from a heart disease and remained at home as a housewife. His childhood was influenced by his school years at the local primary school and his brief period as a member of the local Scouts troop. He attended the Secondary Technical School in Dušní Street and went on to graduate from transport engineering at the Czech Technical University (CTU). Around that time he converted to Christianity and joined the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren (ECCB). He played in Christian folk bands and helped prepare the extensive songbook Svítá (Daybreak). In early 1977 he attended the funeral of Jan Patočka, respected philosopher and first spokesman of Charter 77, which caused him trouble at school. During his one-year compulsory military service, which he began in the Military Arts Corps, he experienced the tense situation caused by the looming threat of an invasion into Poland on the turn of 1980-1981; the following spring he considered boycotting the elections, but in the end he gave into pressure and circumstances and attended the “elections” just like the vast majority of Czechoslovak citizens at the time. Already during his student years he travelled to Romania, where he made contact with the small Czech community in the Banat region. He continued to sympathise with expressions of opposition, and he himself participated in such activities. At a manifestation on 28 October 1989 Jaromír Plíšek was briefly arrested by the police, but this was soon forgotten in the rush of the Velvet Revolution and the collapse of the Communist regime a few weeks later. The witness became a lay member of the Synodical Council of the ECCB, in 1993 he found employment as a diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, his postings included those of ambassador in Hungary and Romania. In 2013 he was to be appointed ambassador in Slovakia, but the newly elected Czech President Miloš Zeman decided instead to give the post to the previous president’s wife Livia Klausová.