She was sentenced to 18 months for a puppet show in a pub in 1974.
Stáhnout obrázek
Lenka Fialová, née Horáková, was born on 30 December 1951 in Zlín. Her father was a cameraman in a local film studio, her mother a puppeteer, her parents were never politically involved. Zlín, renamed Gottwaldov, was a former prosperous Baťa town under the watchful eye of State Security. Lenka Fialová therefore experienced frequent police checks in restaurants and public places, as well as strong communist indoctrination against the popular Baťa family. After primary school, she enrolled at the School of Arts and Crafts in Uherské Hradiště, where she had her first problems with State Security, as she signed her name in the memorial book next to the name of the Soviet ambassador Červoněnko as George Sand during a visit to the glassworks. She was interrogated several times and threatened with expulsion from her studies. She finally finished school in 1974 and began working at the Short Film Ostrava. On 16 August 1974, she and her friends participated in a pilgrimage to Hostýn, where they performed an improvised puppet show for the guests in a restaurant, mocking the regime of the time. The performance was a great success, but they never managed to finish it. On the instructions of State Security officers who were following the group of young people on the way, a uniformed unit brutally intervened. The officers beat the restaurant guests and the actors bloody and took them to the police station in Bystřice pod Hostýnem. From there, Fialová was escorted to Brno, where she spent nine months in custody and underwent numerous interrogations. The interrogators did not use physical violence, but often insulted her, threatened her with the loss of her parents‘ jobs, or offered her collaboration. Immediately after her arrest, Lenka Fialová was fired from her job at Krátký film Ostrava. The trial took place on 11 December 1974 in Kroměříž, and the guests of the restaurant in Hostýn, who were forced by State Security to testify, also testified against the people charged with sedition. An appeals court held on 12 May 1975 in Brno sentenced Lenka Fialová to 18 months in prison, while the oldest of the group of actors received 3 and half years. She served her sentence in Opava prison, where she worked on the production of electric motors and shoelaces. She was released from prison at the end of June 1975 on the basis of an amnesty on the 30th anniversary of the liberation. She found a job in the gardening department of the Gottwaldov City Services and got married. Together with her husband they signed the Charter 77 Declaration in 1977. In Zlín they subsequently experienced persecution by State Security, house searches and surveillance. The pressure from State Security and the conditions in the area eventually forced the Fiala couple to agree to emigrate from Czechoslovakia. After a humiliating several-hour border search, they left the country with their young children in July 1981 and settled in Austria, where they quickly obtained political asylum. Lenka Fialová then devoted herself to analysing Czechoslovak television and radio broadcasts for Free Europe. She began to return to Czechoslovakia after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. Eventually she settled in Znojmo, and her main interest became art. She received an award as a participant of the anti-communist resistance.
