Miroslav Sedlář

* 1958

  • "It was through an event somewhere in the Czech Republic. Somewhere not far from Lipnice. That was good too. They asked me what was going on there. The accustics were so bad that no one heard anything there. I didn't even lie because I didn't really understand anything there and I didn't know who was playing. Some of the interrogations were funny and some were quite dramatic. The most dramatic was in the Old Town below Landštejn. Not an interrogation, but a tough police intervention. It was in the barn on the farm. The city is located right on the Austrian border. Festivals were shown there. There were a lot of people there. We arrived there with my son, who was about four years old. There was also Jirous, who was under protective surveillance at the time. As it was at the border, on one side of the barn stood soldiers with submachine guns and dogs, and on the other side were cops with secret policemen. But no one was aware of the fact that one of them was among us. As they pounded on the gate, their connection opened the door for them. Well, it cleaned up. Jirous was lucky, because it was as if people were counting on it and his friends surrounded him and, as if in some grotesque, led him to the cellar, so they could not find him. But again, they took the boy who was projecting the slides there just to get something out of it at least. Then he arrived the next day after his release, and he was threatened that if he did not speak at the interrogation, his wife would be told that he cheated on her with whores."

  • "I've already had a phobia of any civilian car. When a car door slammed, I stared out the window to see if it was them. I already suffered from chaos in my head. Even though it wasn't them, I packed all the documents, samizdats and the like. I ran with them to the local carpentry, where I had friends and buried them under shavings. All that completely unnecessarily. The state security police did not arrive anyway."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Oskava, 18.02.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 02:03:25
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Oskava, 06.03.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 43:06
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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On one side of the barn stood soldiers with submachine guns and dogs, and on the other cops with secret policemen

Young Miroslav Sedlář
Young Miroslav Sedlář
photo: archiv pamětníka

Miroslav Sedlář was born on November 4, 1958 in Uničov. Since being very young he was part of an underground environment. He went to various secret music festivals with like-minded people, where he often experienced the intervention of police forces. He was also one of the prominent figures of the now legendary pub Čtverka in Uničov, which at the time of normalization became the local centre of the other sort of culture. In Uničov, he organized several unique secret exhibitions with his friends, where local artists exhibited various performances, paintings, photographs, drawings and sculptures in the open countryside. Josef Novák also worked as a guitarist in the band, he organized a concert of the singer Pepa Nos or a performance of the dissident and poet Herman Chromý in his house, and in October 1989 a commemorative event for the banned poet, journalist and writer Jan Alois Zahradníček in the church in Mladějovice. In the first half of the 1980s, together with Zdeněk Dudek, they published the samizdat magazine Zvonek and rewrote and subsequently disseminated various other samizdats on punched paper. He was summoned three times for questioning by the secret police for his activities. He also created dozens of artistic carvings, which underwent several exhibitions after the fall of communism. Since 2013, he has lived with his wife Ludmila in Oskava.