“I remember the joy with which we welcomed the Red Army. One soldier say me on a horse and led me round the church. Then they herded in a swarm of German captives, they set up a camp for them on the meadows downhill from the village. They’d come to us for water because we had a good well, which had enough water in it. I vaguely remember the soldiers as a kind of grey crowd. I’d go out by the back gate to the clearing we had, and there’d be a Red soldiers with a sub-machine gun guarding the captives. They were famished, so when Grandma gave scraps to the pigs, they’d run up and take the food from her bucket and eat it.”
“The explosive was placed in the cellar, on a barrel right by the entrance. It was wrapped in a rag, just like that. The fuses had been discarded at a different place. The investigator later told me it wouldn’t have even worked.”
“Martin Palouš tried to talk me into becoming spokesman for the Charter already in 1986. At the time I was still on probation though, so I didn’t want to risk it. But I promised that if necessary, I would take on the role the following year, which is what happened.”
Jan Litomiský was born on 19 August 1943 in Prague. Towards the end of the war the family moved to the mother’s estate in Vyskytná near Pelhřimov, where the witness lives to this day. He studied at the University of Agriculture, he joined the Czechoslovak People’s Party in 1968, only to renounce his membership after the occupation. During the normalisation he became acquainted with the dissident scene - he was in touch with Ivan Medek, Svatpoluk Karásek, Martin Palouš, and others. Jan Litomiský signed Charter 77, he organised “flat seminars” in his house and participated in the activities of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Persecuted (known under the acronym VONS in Czech). Following provocation by State Security, he was placed on trial in 1981 and sentenced to three years of prison followed by two years of probation. After his release he was unable to find a job, but thanks to the efforts of Professor Skilling he was awarded a Martin Luther King scholarship. After the Velvet Revolution he was elected mayor of Vyskytná and a member of parliament. In 2002 he was awarded a Medal of Merit.
