John BOK (1945)

Portrét

I called Husák a political criminal

He was born in Pardubice on 24 October 1945. He experienced a relatively dramatic childhood in the family of a former member of a Czechoslovak RAF squadron and an English woman who followed her husband to Czechoslovakia after the war. The marriage of Bedřich and Florence Bok was not so happy, in part due to pressure from the Communist authorities, who moved the undesirable family from town to town in the border regions, and in part due to the father’s tendency to debauchery.

The parents divorced when John was 11 and he and his young brother Ivan alternated between their parents’ households. They ended up spending a year in a children’s home, where they experienced cruel bullying by both carers and other children. John’s English grandmother Peaches played an important role in his life. She relocated to Czechoslovakia to be near her daughter and lost a lot in the currency reform. “She worked as a labourer in Tanvald, cleaning spools for weaving machines, but she never complained. She sang Beatles songs, smoked partyzánky and when she was cooking soup was able to move a cigarette from one corner of her mouth to another. She listed to Radio Luxembourg and had a sense of humour.” Once when the State Security (StB) banged on their door, his grandmother, who had just a few words of Czech, welcomed the police with a paper sign reading “Jděte do prdele” (“Piss off”), which she had had her grandson make.

John did an apprenticeship as an electrician and soon after had his first major clash with the regime, when his call-up papers arrived. “The army didn’t make me anything,” he says. “It’s not true that the army makes you a man. Either a servile moron or an asshole with a sense of superiority.” In early 1969 he was deeply shaken by Jan Palach’s self-immolation in protest at creeping normalisation. For some days he considered following suit. He took inspiration from Palach’s stance many years later, when he used the hunger strike as a tool of political protest: “Even before there was the model of the Buddhist monks who set themselves alight in protest at the authoritarian regime where they were. They gave their lives to shake up public opinion. In its way the hunger strike is similar – you put your health on the line and force others to think.”

Until the second half of the 1970s John Bok was a stubborn lone wolf, outside nascent opposition circles. However, even after he signed Charter 77 he never really fitted in with the intellectual community of dissidents, lacking an academic education. He says Václav Havel and his wife Olga gladly used his manual dexterity for all kinds of maintenance work, though he felt they kept a certain distance from him: “The first time I got to Hrádeček was after November 1989,” he says with a hint of bitterness. 

He worked as an engineer on the construction of the Metro, in tough and dangerous conditions where his signature of Charter 77 didn’t bother anybody. “I was working class – that saved me. And even though I was a Chartist, I earned 5,000 a month,” he laughs. However, he spent a large part of his income on alimony, because he fathered three children as a single man before meeting present wife Jitka Boková. “When the women found out who I was, that I had signed Charter, they always backed away. But I paid alimony regularly.”

When 11 members of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted were arrested in 1979 John Bok wrote a letter to the president, Gustáv Husák. “Something stuck in my craw: You’re living here and nobody gives a shit about these people. I wanted to come to terms with myself. So I sat down and wrote Husák a letter where I expressed my view that these people had committed nothing that they didn’t have a right to under our laws. I called on him to halt their criminal prosecution and finished by writing: If you do not do this, I will have no alternative but to call you a political criminal.”  

He didn’t lose his job over this but did find himself in the constant sights of the StB, although he claims to have been the only dissident not subject to an official home search. “I was the only one in the dissent to build a door they couldn’t smash in. It was secured with metal bars that slid into the walls.”

Nevertheless he was frequently interrogated and faced physical and psychological violence in pre-trial detention cells. One time they arrested him when he was taking his daughter Kristýna to school. Bok made the secret policemen accompany him to the door of the first classroom, where he asked a teacher to call his wife.

He was also involved in the production and distribution of banned literature. In the 1980s he was allowed to travel to the West, to which his mother had returned, and hit on a novel way of sneaking banned books and magazines through border controls. “In the night on the way across Germany, where the train emptied out, I would screw off the entire ceiling in the toilet. I placed the magazines and books there and screwed the ceiling shut again. In Prague I went home, changed into overalls and went to the sorting station in Spořilov. As a former rail worker, I easily found out where the train was standing. I said I was meant to change the lightbulbs. I entered the right wagon, unscrewed the toilet ceiling and took it all out.”

In November 1989 John Bok became organiser of Václav Havel’s security team, which he formed of students skilled in judo and karate. “They listened to me as a natural authority. I taught them that whenever we had to clear a path we had to behave decently and politely to people.” He was highly skeptical of the new faces appearing around Havel who had not belonged to the dissent; Václav Klaus, for instance, irritated him. However, John’s sharp temperament later led to him being marginalised. He could not even attend Havel’s inauguration as president on 29 December 1989 because he openly opposed the fact Havel was going to be sworn in under the constitution of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. “You know you’ll be making the same oath as a Communist president? To the Communist constitution?” Bok reproachfully told the president-to-be. He recalls that Havel tried, in vain, to placate him. “‘I won’t calm down, Vašek – stick the revolution up your arse’,” he says, remembering the exchange. “Then I went home and was genuinely sad.”

Even after the revolution John Bok’s involvement in public life was idiosyncratic and controversial. In 1994 he and writer Lenka Procházková set up the Solomon Association, which looks at court cases where there is a suspicion of a flawed investigation or court ruling (for instance the case of Petr Kramný, convicted of murdering his wife and daughter). He was nominated three times for the post of ombudsman and ran in the elections three times. He is a councillor in his Prague 8 district. Even after the revolution he used his time-tested instrument of political activism, the hunger strike. His credo is to fight injustice, whatever the name of the regime committing it.