Simon Rawlence on Věněk Šilhán: Communist Party secretary for a week, signatory of Charter 77
Simon Rawlence, originally hailing from the UK, has been a resident in Czechia for many years, having contributed to the life of the country through organisations like the British Chamber of Commerce. During this multi-topic interview, Simon recounts his first interactions with the Czechs, the role of chocolate in the history of the Anglo-Czech Educational fund, and the story of Věněk Šilhán and his wife Libuše. From ardent communists at the top of the party, to banished dissidents signing Charter 77, Věněk and Libuše were best known to Simon as his parents-in-law.
Simon's early Czech story
My conversation with Simon began with a fundamental question: what were his first interactions with the Czechs?
“One was at university. I was at Cambridge, but then I went and married my wife, who was at Somerville, Oxford. I met a young Czech there called Martin Hošek, who's still alive, living here now. I took him home for the weekend, which I'm not sure was the right thing for him, because we lived quite a grand life with pheasant shooting and all sorts of things. I think he thought that every English person lived in the same way!
“The second was when I did the overland trip to India. I drove, I had a Land Rover and it took me fourteen months to drive to India. It was quite difficult to get into Czechoslovakia then. I think we were allowed to be here for seven days, and we had to say where we were going to stay. We had to ring in every night. But we did get into the country; I remember staying in Karlovy Vary. We had some young colleagues, and I was in contact with a young Czech film director from Czech Television. So I was here in 1972.
“One bit I remember, I think it must have been on Malostranské náměstí: they took us out one night and knocked on the door underneath one of the arches. We went down some cellar steps, and then there was another door, which we knocked on, and we went down again. It was a jazz club! And it was illegal!
“I sat there in the front row, and the first number was The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond. I thought, ‘I'm going to be put in jail for listening to this’. That was my first experience of Czechoslovakia.”
And what were your impressions of the country at that time?
“Well, I've always been quite left wing in my politics. We had had the same experience in East Germany. I could have lived quite happily in both. The fact that there was only one choice of anorak to buy simply didn't affect me. I was not very materialistic. In fact, I was probably pleasantly surprised that ordinary life went on, not taken in by all the propaganda.”
Did you find that there were misconceptions, coming from the UK, about the Czechs and about what the country was like?
“Later on, when I was living here, I eventually persuaded my aged father to come and visit. He could never quite understand why I was living here. He still thought I was a spy in the 2000s, 1990s.
“The one thing he wanted to do was to visit Konopiště. My father liked pheasant shooting. Back in the 60s, he'd arranged to rent Konopiště with some friends for a pheasant shoot for a week. At the last moment, he had cried off, worried about being in a communist country. Obviously, there must have been quite strong feelings then. When he was here, we took him to Konopiště and he was delighted to see all the young pheasants running around under the trees.”
This is all because of the history of Franz Ferdinand? I believe the archduke was a very passionate hunter.
“A very passionate hunter. You've got pictures of him with thousands of pheasants at his feet. But it was also the prime pheasant shoot in Central Europe.”
Something that you wouldn't think was happening behind the Iron Curtain! And when would you place the date of moving to this country?
“I was at Cambridge, doing history, and I was with a man quite well known now: Hugh Kennedy, professor of Arabic. He was at St. Andrews, and he was married to Hillary. I went to her 50th birthday party. They lived in a huge baronial house in Cupar above St. Andrews, big enough to have two conferences going on at the same time. I went up, and there was a birthday party going on, and at the same time, there were some workshops for this methodology in social care. One of the participants was Kateřina Šilhánová, who was the head of the organisation here in Prague.
“Work and meals for the party and workshops were combined, and that's when I met Kateřina. It wasn't long before I decided to come here.”
Helping business with the Chamber of Commerce
During your time in this country, you've not been idle. One organisation that you've been involved with is the British Chamber of Commerce. What does this organisation do?
“Some chambers of commerce do an amazingly focused job. The prime example is the German one. Everything to do with business, finance and commerce is done by the chamber of commerce. You can go in there and get introduced to a connection in your fields in Germany. They have these big markets, fairs for different industries, steel fairs and everything like that.
“The British chamber hasn’t been so focused. It's if you get involved in any government body, it's so subject to changes. For a long time, the commercial side was actually done by the embassy, organising the visits and everything, which left the chamber to do other things. When I first came here, I was in a little consultancy that was matching small companies. In fact, ironically, we matched more Irish companies than we did British ones, because the Irish were very pro-Europe and actually funded these people to come and visit.
“We would organise for them to go around the country looking at various manufacturers. Once a month, I would get a phone call from a small Czech outfit that had bought a bit of British kit and it wasn't working. A little bit of pressure from me and they'd send somebody out, a salesman or a technician.
“In the end, I think it lost its way a bit, because there was a lot of entertaining and networking. So less and less the decision makers were involved; it was more salesmen trying to sell to each other. Then it changed again, because after I left, the British government decided that all the commercial stuff that was being done at the embassy would go back to the chamber. Then it actually became much bigger again and probably more focused.”
Love, chocolate and the Anglo-Czech Educational Fund
And what about your work with the Anglo-Czech Educational Fund?
“That's more relevant, and the fund has a funny history. It started with a man called Arnošt Kramer, who was a confectioner back in the 70s. He decided that he would like to emigrate with his wife. Crucial people then were not allowed to leave the country together. So it was quite a well-planned exit.
“His wife divorced him, married an Englishman, and then pootled off to England, leaving Kramer on his own as a bachelor. He decided to go to England, but he stopped for a while in East Germany, where he purloined a secret recipe. When he was ready, he then joined her, in York, where it must have been Rowntrees or something like that. He was employed with his secret recipe and accumulated quite a lot of money. By that time, of course, his wife had divorced the Englishman and remarried Arnošt.
“The idea was that they were going to help fund other young Czechs to emigrate. But by that time, 89 had come and the original purpose wasn't there. So people changed the wording of the trust. It's registered in England as a charitable trust, and the fund was used to finance study stays in England for young Czechs.
“So that’s what we did. About a dozen young Czechs every year came forward with an amazing variety of different topics, which always interested me. There was somebody going to study criminology in the University of Essex; language and cognition at University College London; two different archaeologists (one was medieval, one was something else); two lots of literature (one was modern 20th century literature, the other was heroines in Shakespeare); and the last one was at the University of Oxford to study Jewish identity. It was very stimulating for the trustees.”
And what was your role specifically?
“To get it on its feet, really, produce a website, and try to modernise it a bit. Also, more importantly, it had just relied on candidates from Charles University. One of the ideas behind the website and my going out and meeting other academics was to spread it to other universities. I'm glad to say that by the time I left, it had, particularly Masaryk University in Brno.”
That's a wonderful contribution to the modern country and all comes about through a story of love, divorce and chocolate.
The story of Věněk Šilhán and Libuše Šilhánová
Turning away from you, Simon, specifically, I would really like to talk about the family that you married into in this country, specifically the character of Věněk Šilhán and his wife Libuše. In our email correspondence, you said that this incredible couple “went through the gamut of Czech history”. That’s an understatement. First and foremost, who were they, and what did they do and believe prior to 1968?
“They're teenagers or just young adults in 1945. It must have been an exhilarating time because they've been liberated, the occupation has ended, but there was an awful lot of rebuilding to do.
“There was something called the Children's Railway in Slovakia. This involved Libuše. 46,000 children participated and not just from Czechoslovakia, but from all over Europe. They rebuilt this railway, literally, I mean. Libuše, as a 17-year-old, was handling a pneumatic drill. They slept in tents in the open. Very sadly, Libuše got tuberculosis there, which affected her for the rest of her life. But that was an example of the enthusiasm here.
“Věněk hadn't gone to university because there were no universities in the Czech lands, you have to remember that. He trained as a locksmith. He was a very technical person, very skilled. He ended up in Chomutov, which had been a Sudeten area. There was a very well-known German-owned steel tube manufacturer, which had employed 4,000 people – who weren't there!
“So they took over this factory, and they had to find 4,000 other people. Some of them were young Czechs, but a lot were Italians and people brought in. They had to run this factory. There seemed to have been meetings with some young people that Věněk decided to go along to, because they seemed to know what they were doing. They made some decisions together. Only later did Věněk realise that that was a communist cell. But they got things done. That's how Věněk got into management. It was later that he got to university, to the School of Economics, wanting to develop it further.”
And this is not an atypical story for those post-war years, with people who embraced communism and left-wing politics in an effort to try and rebuild the country, and get away from the past.
“I think that's terribly important. I've still got friends who, for instance, don't agree with the current president, Pavel (who I think is a wonderful example of what a president should be), because once he was a Communist. But you wouldn't have got anywhere if you hadn't been. He wouldn't have got to be a general in the army if he'd not been a member of the Communists.”
And in the story of Věněk, take us up to the year 1968. What is he doing throughout the 1960s?
“In the 60s, he's not political at all. He's the dean of the School of Economics. But he's an active party member. He's one of the people elected to the supreme body that has power in Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party. The party every four years has a congress, and all those people are elected for a congress that's going to meet in September 1968.
“People don't realise why the Russians invaded in August 1968. They invaded in order to preempt the congress. They took over communications and broadcasting; there was a battle here in the place where I'm speaking. But the Czechs very cleverly organised a very informal network of radio. The message went out to all the elected representatives of the congress to meet in Prague the next day. It's 1,500 people, and they managed to do it. They came from Slovakia and everything.
“They met in a disused factory in Vysočany, which was guarded by trade unionists with guns. The Russians were here with their tanks, and this Congress was meeting, unbeknownst to them. They passed two or three resolutions. The first was that they didn’t agree with the Russian invasion. The second was, ‘please bring back our government’, because the Russians had kidnapped all the cabinet ministers and Dubček. They were locked in a villa somewhere in Moscow.
“I don't know how far down the agenda, but because Šilhán had been so active in all this and on the board, they then elected him as the temporary General [First] Secretary of the Communist Party, who was always the head man in the country. So, for ten crucial days until the government returned, he actually ran the country. He organised a strike, a huge strike of everybody, children and schools as well. But then, of course, it all changed. Dubček came back.”
During those ten days, how do you think he must have felt? And what was he thinking? Did he think he could make change? Or was he just a brave man who took on a doomed cause?
“From Kateřina’s point of view, she was fifteen, and she was on the national committee of the students organising the strikes and everything. But more importantly, there was a huge worry that the children would be grabbed as hostages. So they were all taken by the Czech army into a safe house.
“I can't be inside Šilhán’s mind. I just think he thought something should happen. Very soon afterwards, you get normalisation. By the time you get to January 1969, you've got Jan Palach's death. What Czechs don't realise is Jan Palach didn't die as a protest against the Russian invasion. He died as a protest against the apathy of the Czech people. So in those four months, everybody's gotten used to it.”
Understandably, you can't get inside your father-in-law's head, but we have at least the external facts of what happened then. What did happen after the events of the Warsaw Pact invasion? How did he live out the rest of his life?
“One of the tenets of communism was work. He wasn't imprisoned immediately, killed or anything like that, but he lost his academic job. Libuše did as well.
“I have to go back a bit and say that actually in early 1969, the borders were open and people could emigrate quite easily. In fact, there was a time when all the Šilhánovi were outside the country. Kateřina was in Finland, her mother was lecturing in America, and they met outside the country and said, ‘look, we're outside the country, we can leave’. They all decided, ‘no, we'll go back to Czechoslovakia, because someone has got to be here to shepherd it when it all collapses’. They thought it would be five years. Of course, it was 20 years. But they actually positively made the decision to return.
“During that time, he lost his job at the university. The whole way of getting at academics was to give them manual work. But Šilhán, because he'd been an apprentice locksmith, was very handy with his hands. When I show people around, I like taking them to Old Town Square, and there's a beautiful pink palace in Old Town Square called Kinský Palace. I point out all the ironwork around the edge. All of that was done by Šilhán.
“Whatever he was given to do manually, he excelled at. He ended up dredging lakes. He was a bagrista, a manual worker.”
Did they both live to see the Velvet Revolution?
“Yes, they both lived to see it. Another thing was that he was exiled from Prague. But they did have a cottage in Kokořín. There are some very secret valleys, and there were a lot of dissidents living there at the time. In fact, it was quite an active community. So they'd see their father on the weekends, but he wasn't allowed to come into Prague.”
Yet, despite this removal from Prague and basically having to exist in a network of dissidents in the Bohemian countryside, he was a signatory of Charter 77.
“Oh, yes, that must have happened. I don't know how they all met. According to Kateřina, growing up as a teenager, their flat was a meeting place for them. If I believe it, maybe even Charter 77 was drafted in the flat. But certainly all those people came, and she was there. For instance, there was a party when Havel was released from prison in his flat next to the dancing house; she was there at that party. They were very close and really helped each other a lot.
“Even then, you've got the spying, with the STB. He had another friend, a fellow academic, who then came to Věněk and said, ‘I've got to report on you’. They would take the dogs for a walk in the park, they'd meet every month or something, and Šilhán would tell his friend what he could say back to the StB.”
And he was harassed by the secret police as well?
“They were very clever. They had samizdats and everything, and they kept them in a plastic folder. When they knew that the flat was being searched, the bath was always full of water with clothes in it. They just put the samizdats in the plastic folder underneath the clothes, in the bath water. Nobody ever thought to look.
“They were once searched at the cottage. Kokořín is a sort of canyon. The cottage is actually like a cave carved out of the rock. At the time they were very basic, no running water or anything like that. The toilet was just down the hill, quite messy. There was a bucket that they could lower, and they put the samizdats in the bucket and lowered it, through all the refuse from the toilet. So nobody ever saw that either.”
Such incredible activities that would eventually bear fruit in the end of the 1980s, happening in very humble dwellings in the countryside. To round our conversation off by bringing it back to you, Simon, what was it like to marry into this family?
“Actually, not very welcoming, which is interesting. In communist times, there was a lot of tolerance for extramarital affairs, much more than in the UK. You can imagine that lots of activities were restricted, but you couldn't actually control that. Kateřina was married at the time, and has one son. Věněk Šilhán was not very happy to meet me, because having an affair is okay, but not destroying a marriage.
“It wasn't until Martin, my stepson, was eighteen and Katerina's first husband had a party in their villa in Černošice, and Věněk Šilhán saw how friendly I was with her ex-husband, that he warmed a bit. Then we were friends.
“Libuše actually was always very kind. She was my first Czech teacher and we often used to speak in Latin. Because we both studied Latin, it makes it easier to understand Czech, because of the declensions and everything like that. Not that I speak Czech well at all, I don't. In fact, my Kateřina says I got worse.”
Simon, this has been wonderful, I've learned so much. Your story and the story of your in-laws flesh out the skeleton of history that so many of us have. Thank you very much for talking to me today.
“Thank you too, Danny.”
