MUDr. František Zeman

* 1952

  • "I came to those Svitavy, there sat the district committee of the Communist Party, it was about twenty guys, who nodded wisely there, and the biggest of them, the secretary, I had forgotten his name, so he said: 'But doctor, what are you doing, you see there are no demonstrations anywhere and you provoked it there in Litomyšl, so you have to sign up as the initiator of those demonstrations, because if someone brakes the shop window, you pay for it and somehow we don't like it.' And he said, 'After all, when it all calms down and is over, there's no reason why you can't be a senior official on a district national committee, like the health department.' I said, 'I think when all this is over, it won't be up to you.' They looked at me so strangely, I said, 'Everyone knows I'm here on the district committee, and if something happens to me, I think you might lock me up somewhere, then these people know.' That wasn't true, of course, and then they said, "Come on, Doctor, go carefully to Litomyšl so that nothing happens to you and, most importantly, let the demonstration take place in peace."

  • "Well, microphones were put on the flatbed, so the people who climbed up there were visible, everyone could see them, and thanks to the sound system, everyone could hear them. Well, he could actually be there on the flatbed, And the former director of a local technical school also abused it and went up there and started to say that it must be ... that socialism was not so bad and that the communist party would get better and just started talking there such things that the people gradually began to get angry, and he kept talking, and since there was no way to stop him from doing so, just cut him off or throw him off the flatbed, which of course we didn't do, so I was standing there and in fact I seemed to moderate the whole thing and to those people, because I had a second microphone, so I said: 'Please, you're still yelling at the person here and it's not democratic or effective, you know what, if you don't agree with what the man says, turn your back. ' And the whole square turned its back on that gentleman."

  • "Just to describe the absurdity what was going on there in the village of Aňa, how stupid those people were by the propaganda they was beat into them - so I had fun with a boy of the same age as me, around 15 to 16 years. And I told him what we were doing and so on and he asked what you were doing on Saturday or Sunday, at that time it was still working on Saturday, on Sunday. I said: 'Well lets sit in the car and lets go to Kroměříž to visit friends.´ And he said, 'And your dad is a driver?' And I said, 'No, he's not a driver, he's a technical officer, but we have a car at home, so we just get in the car and go to visit.' And he said, 'But it's not possible, you have the car rented from the factory?' I said, 'No, it's our car, we just have a car at home in the garage.' Well, he looked at me like that and said, 'Do you have a plane?' I said, 'We don't have a plane.' - 'And you're flying to the United States with him?' I said, 'Well, we don't fly if we don't have a plane, and we can't fly to the United States.' - 'Then you can't even have a car!'"

  • "We came there, to a village, and there was just a water pipe in the ditch that ended in front of the house, and the owner of the house ran up and was happy to give us something. So he filmed the water from the water main and said that he was with us, that he liberated Czechoslovakia, and that he was very excited to see us. Yet we weren't very excited because we saw how poorly these people actually lived, how the regime told them how well they were doing. The man sensed that they were better off because he had to go to the well for water before, that's how the Soviet regime brought the water to him in front of the barracks, and we knew that we had the water inside the house, that we had bathrooms, that we had hot water and they only have the water in front of the house. And they were terribly happy with it."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Litomyšl, 28.03.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 01:09:02
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

I am very glad that there was a revolution and it set us free

František Zeman at the Smetana monument in Litomyšl
František Zeman at the Smetana monument in Litomyšl
photo: Archiv pamětníka

František Zeman was born in June 1952 in Kroměříž, but he spent almost his entire life in Litomyšl. He graduated from the Secondary General Education School in Litomyšl. Here he met his future wife, with whom he has lived to this day. He graduated from the Medical Faculty of Charles University in Hradec Králové, where he most enjoyed psychiatry and dentistry, which he devoted to his entire professional life. He was one of the first to take part in protests in Litomyšl after November 17, 1989. He organized and moderated anti-communist demonstrations; he was also at the birth of the local Civic Forum. He later joined the successor Civic Democratic Party. From 1990 to 1993 he worked as the director of the Litomyšl hospital.