Radovan Brož

“A friend of mine, an emigrant, came to us and said: ‘This is your last day here, tomorrow you fly to Toronto. I’ll wait for you there, you have the whole day, I’ll show you around.’ A Slovak guy followed me; he was definitely a private eye who had been stationed there at the last minute. They had put out the Czech running couch who had his charges there, and this new guy even borrowed stopwatch from me, he didn’t even bring a stopwatch. My friend was waiting for me at the Toronto airport, which is a huge airport with three terminals, but he found me. I said: ‘I’ll leave it up to you but I’d really like to see the Škvorecký’s publishing house, the ‘68 Publishers.’ He said: ‘It’s such a shame but I don’t know where that is.’ We drove to some bookshop and he figured it out there. We drove to the suburbs, to a house with a stone-brick underpinning, we walked into a vaulted room, rung the bell and Mrs. Zdena Salivarová came. I had my last fifty Canadian dollars, so I bought two books from Hrabal’s trilogy and then I bought the third one after the revolution. She packed me a stack of magazines of the Toronto emigrant organization called Masaryktown.”

“They approached me twice. In 1972 when the Center for top-level sports and youth was emerging and I was supposed to be the head couch, that’s when they invited me in. It was in Polabiny on the first floor. It was incredible. About a week earlier our charges had been there. And two brave ones had dared to tell me, although they had of course instructed them not to tell anyone. On Monday my colleague Náhlík was there at 5 p.m., on Tuesday at 6 p.m. it was my colleague Čechák and then on Wednesday at 6.30 p.m. I went. After three hours they invited me for coffee to the next room. Only then I got it. That they had had a recorder in their drawer, taping the whole thing, and that they had run out of tape. Then I had to sign some papers, of course, but not collaboration, just a record of the… well it was an interrogation but they didn’t call it that.”

“Only much later did I understand that my father used to take me, a little boy, as kind of a protection. We would be given meat from a pig-slaughter and so on. I know that it was a paper suitcase, tied with rope for more safety. I’m telling you this to demonstrate how brave the railway conductors were. Imagine that we took the train from Hradec Králové and a conductor came in Rosice and said: ‘All of you carrying something, go through the fence.’ The railway men had a little door in the fence about one hundred and twenty meters from the old station towards the ‘Fantovka’ refinery, and they used it to take a shortcut to work. The people smuggling these secret pig-slaughters went that way and thus avoided the economic control. If someone had turned the conductor in, it would have been big trouble, of course.”

“Nevertheless, in 1972 some good soul probably informed the State Security Police that I had talked somewhere and that it had not been in a positive way. They summoned me to the passport department and they told me that it was not in line with the interests of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic for me to be a holder of a travel document. And for the next fourteen years I was not even able to go to Poland. Athletes from my team went to stupid Železná Gora, just behind the border, and the StB men summoned me and they warned me: ‘And you must not tell them the reason why you are not going with them. You must not say why.’”

“There was some kind of an entrance examination for the secondary school. It was in the Slovak National Uprising Street, where the Elementary School of the Slovak National Uprising is located today. And apart from that, we had to undergo screening. I completed the regular grammar school in 1948, no, it was later, in 1948 I finished grammar school and then the minister of education professor Nejedlý performed the reorganization of the school system, and I have experienced several of them. So I attended a higher elementary school for three years and then in 1952, I sat for an exam to be admitted to the unified secondary school. And a comrade teacher came to visit us. The teachers were called either ‘tenners’ or ‘twentiers,’ because they were assigned either ten or twenty families to screen. This was a praiseworthy activity from the viewpoint of the political regime. A comrade teacher thus came to our home, her family used to own a shop, and so this activity was now her way of redeeming herself for that. My mom showed her to the living room, where we had a large portrait of president Masaryk. And so I was not admitted to the unified secondary school at the first try. But they didn’t know my mom – she pressed the school principal Peřina and she asked him: ‘How come that our Radovan did not get admitted?’ He replied: ‘You know, he had a B in mathematics.’ – ‘All right, he had a B in math, and so you admitted this… – I shall not name him – who had a D in math instead?’ I eventually got admitted to the school after an appeal.”

“I know that we slept with my brother – I have a brother who is two years younger – in the parents’ bedroom and my grandma, the mother of my mom’s, slept in another room. And she came there and she told dad: ‘Jarek, get up, something is happening. There is light outside as if during the day.’ Well, we quickly put on clothes and we ran to the basement and the sirens were already sounding an alarm. Well, the light was caused by so-called flares, which were target indicating devices before that bombing group. The Allies have already taken over Italy at that time, and so they were not dispatched from England, as they had been when they had deployed the paratroopers here in 1941, for instance – at that time they had flown from England, but now they were already flying from Italy. So-called ‘marking planes’ flew in there before the bombing group and they dropped indicator flares on small parachutes over the target. The target in Pardubice, obviously, was the present-day Ramovka factory, which was called Fanta factory at that time. Very valuable fuels, petrol and kerosene were produced there. And since the Germans were gradually loosing the Romanian oil sources, the Allies therefore focused on bombing the fuel refineries in Pardubice, Most and Litvínov. It was around midnight. I remember that before we managed to put our clothes on, we could already see from the window as the first bombs were falling in the light of those flares. Later we identified it precisely, it was somewhere behind the school in Spořilov, that’s where the first bombs were dropped. We already ran into the basement. It was really scary. Although we were not really an orthodox Catholic family, in this horror we did pray the Lord’s Prayer. Because obviously you don’t see the bombs inside the basement, but you can hear their whistling sound.”