Pavel ZÁLESKÝ (1955)

Portrét

In some ways the normalisation period was worse than the 1950s terror

Pavel Záleský was born into a Catholic family in Mutěnice, southern Moravia on 28 February 1955. He was the first son of Petr and Julie Záleský, who had a farm with fields, a vineyard and cattle. His father also worked on the railways. Pavel Záleský had hardly begun to take in the world around him when he witnessed the persecution of his family, who had dared to resist the regime. “I was three, but I remember how StB men in leather coats came for father. I was later traumatised by this. When we visited father in a labour camp I just gripped the bars tightly and didn’t even look at dad.” The State Security (StB) arrested his father and his brother František in 1958 for disseminating anti-socialist poems. Communist courts sentenced him to two and a half years for subversion, which he served at the Bytíz uranium camp near Příbram. 

At that time a co-operative farm was established in Mutěnice, but farmers were reluctant to join. However after the arrest of the Záleský brothers even the last opponents of collective farming ceased resisting. The co-op members grabbed what they could from Pavel Záleský’s family. “They nationalised our house. We were able to stay in it, it’s true, but we had to play rent until 1989. Co-op officials took our cattle away. They destroyed our apricot orchard. One time a digger came and pulled up around 30 trees. They took our cultivated vineyards and left us with waste ground.”

Pavel Záleský graduated from a railways vocational school in Hodonín. In 1975 he was called up for two-year military service, most of which he spent in units on the closely guarded German border by Cheb and Louny. “There was terrible bullying and brain-washing there. The political officers drummed into our heads that the West was threatening us and we had to be prepared for the enemy. I understood that we weren’t protecting the peace but preparing for war.” At that time he seriously pondered emigration and began learning English. “I would have done it if my future wife, who was worried about me and also wanted to get married, hadn’t intervened.” 

After their wedding, when the couple lived in Ludkovice near Luhačovice, he began producing samizdat. “I copied whatever came into my hands. I got some stuff from priests. I worked, for instance, with Father Rudolf Vašíček and Father Václav Divíšek, who both spent many years in jail. I also obtained materials from the Christian Academy in Rome.” He copied texts on a typewriter. He was able to produce 10 to 12 copies using photocopiers, which soon struck him as too few. “I invented a kind of material from gelatine, lead oxide and various chemical compounds, turning into a form onto which I imprinted the matrix. You could make up to 30 copies from that. But it was very wet we so I had to dry it. There were papers laid out around the whole flat.”

At this time he was living with his wife and children in Otrokovice, where he gradually got to know the Zlín dissidents Jaromír Němec and Stanislav Devátý. He also began cooperating with one of the bravest representatives of the Catholic dissent, Augustin Navrátil. “This was teamwork of the highest standard. I received a duplicating from Augustin on which more than 500 copies were made. And we were banging out Church Information and Charter 77 Information.” For years he felt that the StB were unaware of him. Until, that is, a crackdown on the Otrovice and Zlín samizdat production nest took place in November 1985.

Fortunately he learned in advance of the arrest of Jaromír Němec and Pavel Dudr from Zlín, who had been illegally copying bulletins and literature. He got home from work before the StB ran his bell and tidied up a bit, though far from everything. Miraculously they didn’t discover evidence required for prosecution, though it was in the flat. “I had an address book, which they didn’t find, behind a picture. I had duplicating dye under the bath, which they also didn’t discover. And in the corridor they didn’t notice a box, which they walked past repeatedly, of paper and dye remnants. I felt God’s help, protecting me from tough incarceration.”

At this time he experienced his first interrogation, though he was released after about five hours. Between then and November 1989 he was harassed, followed and regularly hauled in for 24 or 48 hours for interrogation by the StB. “I’ve been through perhaps hundreds of hours of interrogation. Once after 48 hours they released me and when I’d hardly taken a few steps they detained me again for the same period.” He gradually reached the point where he didn’t say a word to the StB. When they came to arrest him he refused to go, lying on the ground before being hauled off violently. If they came for him in work, where he was a railways lineman, he gripped the tracks tightly. “They beat me badly lots of times. They also put special cuffs on me that with every movement cut into my hands. I was covered in blood. One time they threatened to throw me on the tracks in such a way as to make it look like suicide. It was no fun.”

Soon after his first interrogation and home search he signed Charter 77. He devoted the final two years before the fall of communism chiefly to producing the illegal magazine Christian Horizons. “Augustin Navrátil and I edited the texts and did printing and distribution. We did 500 copies and the magazine had 20 or more pages. When they locked Augustin up in a mental hospital I visited him to do editing.” The magazine was sent to hundreds of addresses around the country. 

In 1987 he helped Augustin Navrátil to draft the petition Catholics’ Impulses to Resolving the Situation of Religious Citizens, known as the Moravian Appeal, which called in 31 points for freedom of religion. The petition was demonstrably supported by over 500,000 people in Czechoslovakia. In reality there were more but the StB confiscated copies of the petition. It was the largest petition drive against the Communist regime. Around 2,000 people signed Charter 77 while the Several Sentences initiative of spring 1989 had over 300,000 signatories.

Shortly before the Velvet Revolution Communist prosecutors began indicting him but ran out of time to bring him to trial. Pavel Záleský is convinced that not only God but the interest of the international stations Radio Free Europe and Voice of America saved him from tougher persecution. “When any of us were arrested they reported on it immediately – and that impacted them quite a bit.”

Pavel Záleský says that normalisation period of the 1970s and 1980s was in some ways worse than the terror of the 1950s. “Normalisation was about destroying the spirit. You lived in a bad society but learned to dissemble. One thing was said on television, another in work, another at home. People went to wave flags on May Day and then cursed the comrades at home. It would have sufficed if people hadn’t gone like a dumb mass to vote and things might’ve been different. Admittedly there were lots of brave people, but not enough. The normalisation regime was fiendish and as a nation we bear the consequences of moral devastation to this day.”