Vladimír Mikuláš

* 1947

  • "It was such despair then, such despair when people started dropping dead there, when, as I say, he was firing a machine gun against the pavement and you could hear the bullets whistling. I was just thinking, 'Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop!' Because there was no way to win. There was no way to win. And I'm still thinking, I'm just thinking, 'Thank God some of those soldiers didn't go crazy and did not let that machine gun shoot against those people."

  • "There came such gentlemen, nicely dressed, with umbrellas, two of them, elegant. And they told us they had been there during the revolution, and said, 'Well, yeah, but we had panzerfausts and machine guns. And now you've got the toothpicks, too.' The little pistols we had. 'What are we going to do here?'"

  • "They didn't know that tanks would arrive there, that there would be shooting. They were also innocently involved. They were instructed by someone to put the unit there. I didn't even see them afterwards, if any of the commanders stayed there. I didn't see any commander there afterwards. He wouldn't have been of any use there. Everybody there acted according to their instinct - sometimes self-preservation, mostly anger, desperation. I know I went to those tanks, of course, before they were fully firing, and we also... the uniform inspired a little respect in those soldiers. When they saw the uniform and they saw that I was the lowest rank possible, I had a round cap and something on, a pistol..."

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    Praha, 02.02.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:27:25
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Nobody knew what to expect at the radio station

Vladimir Mikuláš in 2023
Vladimir Mikuláš in 2023
zdroj: Post Bellum

Vladimír Mikuláš was born on 20 November 1947 in Dobřany near Pilsen to parents Vlasta and Karel Mikuláš. After finishing primary school, he trained as a milling cutter at the Škoda factory in Pilsen. After completing his basic military service, he joined the National Security Corps (SNB) in January 1968 and spent the first day of the Soviet occupation as a patrolman at Czechoslovak Radio. At the time of normalisation he was expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), which he had joined shortly before. In 1974 he was unexpectedly dismissed from SNB as well. He drove as a taxi driver until the 1990s before rejoining the police. He worked as an operations officer and inspector at the Police Headquarters. In 2002, he published his first book Policejní úsměvy (Police Smiles), and in 2016 his partially autobiographical novel Everyone Has Their Own Destiny. At the time of redcording, in 2023, he was living in South Bohemia near Kostelec nad Vltavou.