Stanislav PITAŠ (1957)

Portrét

My father asked what I got from Havel

At that time he was just over 20 and had already had several run-ins with the normalisation regime. Stanislav Pitaš was born on December 12, 1957 and comes from the East Bohemian village of Kocbeře. His first scrapes had nothing to do with politics. “It was all about rebellion, music. Who could stomach Plavce, Greenhorns or Olympic? I was into the alternative scene.” One element of this was long hair, which sparked a conflict with his father. Once when his father came home drunk he even tried to cut off his hair while he was asleep. 

His first encounter with Václav and Olga Havel at Hrádeček went surprisingly smoothly. “At first Václav Havel was afraid, wary. Maybe he thought somebody had sent me after him. He found it strange that I had got through to him so easily.” But thanks to his genuine curiosity the long-haired youth soon gained the trust of the Havels. Meanwhile they made a good impression with friendly behaviour bereft of superiority. “I started to visit them regularly. I was something like a maintenance guy at Hrádeček. I chopped wood, picked blackcurrants with Olga and mowed the grass.”

His friendship with the Havel’s deepened the conflict with his father. “He said: ‘What do you have from Havel? In any case he’ll leave you to rot. When they lock you up nobody will help you.’” However, he regarded his relationship with Václav and Olga Havel as motivation for personal growth. “After some time I realised I wasn’t a solo player – I was in a community of people that I respected immensely and I didn’t want to disgrace them. I kept my long hair – that I wouldn’t give up. But I no longer rolled around drunk in ditches. I stopped smoking grass. I didn’t want to give anyone a pretext for picking me up over something so ridiculous. I couldn’t risk that.”  He also become close to people from the underground. He started visiting a community at Nová Víska near Chomutov, attended Plastic People of the Universe concerts and became friends with Mikoláš Chadim.                                                                     

His activities didn’t escape the attentions of the State Security (StB). At the psychiatric clinic where he was an outpatient a surprise awaited him one day: He was forced into an ambulance and, with StB officers present, taken to a psychiatric department in Hradec Králové and later to a hospital in Kosmonosy. “It really was like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: a TV behind bars, patients chased out of their rooms and lying around the corridors, doped up. They fill you full of pills, which you have to swallow in front of the nurse and take a drink. I didn’t know why I was there and I was scared to death that they’d give me insulin shocks or electric shocks.” 

In Trutnov, where Stanislav Pitaš was then living, the police pressure intensified. He was regularly summoned for interrogation and feared home searches that would cost him the samizdat materials he helped to distribute. During one interrogation in early 1982 the StB suggested he leave the country. “I said, Why should I leave? I’ve got my parents, friends, lovers here…” He understood that he was really becoming persona non grata in Trutnov and decided to move somewhere he wouldn’t draw so much attention. 

He moved to the village of Šonov in the remote Broumov area, close to the Polish border. He bought a derelict house which he repaired with his own hands over several years. He made a very modest living at a nearby quarry. Local people addressed him as Sandokan in view of his long hair and beard, though he got on well with them. However the idea he would escape the sights of the StB in a godforsaken village was naive. “Within 10 days the new StB men came to introduce themselves.”

Stanislav Pitaš was jailed for the first time in 1985. The pretext was a joking collage created during a New Year’s Eve party: He and friends added photographs of Gustav Husák and Leonid Brezhnev, a wooden penis, old medals and quotations from Rudé právo to a picture of a roasted goose. The collage was discovered during a search of his home. Stanislav was sentenced to eight months, which was to be served at Bory prison in Plzeň, a jail for tough convicts. There he experienced the notorious polishing of glass pebbles used for light fittings and costume jewellery, one of the toughest and health threatening jobs prisoners were forced to do in normalisation Czechoslovakia. Failure to meet quotas resulted in whole groups of prisoners having their food rations cut, parcels seized or other punishments, meaning that alongside harassment from guards prisoners also bullied one another. “I understand the people who didn’t handle it mentally,” says Stanislav Pitaš.

He subsequently ended up in prison twice, the last time in spring 1989 when he was charged with stealing property in socialist ownership. The indictment stated that he had stolen 100 concrete tiles from his place of work. Despite the fact his boss confirmed that no tiles had gone missing he was immediately placed in custody. “At that time my mother was dying. It was clear she only had a few weeks left,” says Stanislav Pitaš. He took part in a chain hunger strike in support of political prisoners. “It looks like this: You’re in a cell alone, so you can’t eat your fellow prisoners’ food. You always get food in the cell but you can’t touch it. Every day they took me the doctors for checks. It was after the death of Pavel Wonka and they were afraid another political prisoner might die on them.”

After several days they promised to release him for one day to say goodbye to his mother, if he ended the hunger strike. Stanislav Pitaš agreed and was released from custody. “But outside were the State Security with cuffs and they locked me up again.” He never saw his mother alive again. Neither was he allowed out for her funeral. “It was one of the worst moments of my life. Mum had visited me in jail. She even came to see me at that last prison, already seriously ill. And this was those bastards’ revenge,” says Stanislav Pitaš.

His mother died in autumn 1989, just a few days before the fall of the Communist regime. Stanislav was released from jail on 1 December, a few days after a general strike that confirmed the end of the regime. In the following months he was chairman of the screening commission in the small town of Žacléř in the Trutnov area. He also experienced a number of dramatic moments in this period, when he learned which of his friends had collaborated with the StB. 

“For me it was always about living the way that’s normal today: living freely, behaving naturally, not hypocritically. I had problems because I said out loud what 90 percent of the nation was just thinking in their hearts,” says Stanislav Pitaš. And to this day he recalls friends from the dissent with love and respect. “I got into a circle of people who I respected. Whether they were people from the underground or intellectuals from Hrádeček, I could always count on them.”