Sometimes State Security officers would take me into the woods where I didn‘t know
Stáhnout obrázek
Jiří Váňa was born on March 26, 1962 in Vítkov near Opava. His father was a butcher, his mother was a shop assistant. He had an older brother who died tragically. Neither during the war nor after February 1948 did the family experience any illegality or property injustice; no one in the immediate family was a member of the Communist Party. Jiří Váňa graduated from primary school in Vítkov. In 1977, he was strongly influenced by the Czechoslovak television documentary Assassination of Culture about the music groups Plastic People of the Universe and DG 307. He got his information from Free Europe or Voice of America, exile literature and samizdat. After elementary school he apprenticed as a refrigeration mechanic in Ostrava. From 1981 to 1983 he did military service. He signed Charter 77 in the second half of the 1980s. After signing it, he was often interrogated, threatened, sometimes beaten during illegal concerts, or dragged by police officers into an unknown forest at night. He witnessed police manoeuvres in the Vítkov cemetery on the anniversary of the self-immolation of local native Jan Zajíc. Jiří Váňa was in contact with chartists from Ostrava and Opava. In the 1980s he travelled to Poland and Hungary in search of unofficial culture. Until 1989, he worked at Elektroslužby Ostrava. After the fall of communism in November 1989, he went abroad and spent six years travelling and working in various European and non-European countries. After his return, he settled in his native Vítkov.
