“They left the livestock, which was pretty smart that they expected, when confiscating the feed, that it would result in the livestock dying. Well, it was quite cruel. My grandfather, not that he was afraid of any traps they could set up afterwards, he was such a devoted farmer that he would rather die himself than see his livestock perish. And so every day at three in the morning, before I went to school, we would take the cart and go around ditches, creeks, and we would mow and collect grass and take it home so that the animals would survive. So when they saw that their plan wasn't working they showed up and took the animals too, and destroyed everything quite mercilessly.”
“I was trying to get from the port by stopping a truck or something but nothing rode by. The whole time, I would always go there in the morning and in the evening, it was about a kilometre away from the old lady we were staying with. Well and the last day when I was really about to give up, I even exceeded the travel permit I had by a day, I went there, my boy was still sleeping. And suddenly I saw a truck back there, empty, just the tractor unit. I came closer, I see an Austrian license plate and I completely froze. Because before whenever I found one they were Austrians usually driving away from the port, to Arabia or somewhere. And this one was empty, just waking up. So I knocked and asked if he was going to Austria. He said: ‘Well, yeah.’ So I asked if we could hitchhike with him. ‘What do you mean, we?’ ‘Well, I have my boy with me, if that would be possible.’ ‘Well, why wouldn't it, but make it quick because I'm about to get going.’ ”
“I had quite a cheeky moment back then, we were subscribed to the agriculture newspaper and I would send them poems and get books for that. And so I wrote them a question whether a school principal could ban me from studying at a high school. And that was in 1965, I finished in 1966. And the newspaper published a response stating that a principal could not decide whether I was allowed to study or not. And so I took the newspaper to school, the principal was boiling with anger, but it was a success. In 1966 I applied for admission to an engineering school, I passed the exams, at the time it was quite a premium school so there were loads of us.”
Martin Tomešek was born on the 13th of September 1950 in Hrubá Vrbka in Moravia. His parents had a farm estate that the communists kept trying to include in the local agriculture cooperative. They resisted for a long time but had to abandon private farming in 1960. The communists set up their mandatory deductions so high that even with a well-managed estate there was not enough feed left for the livestock and they could hardly sustain themselves. Nobody wanted to employ Martin‘s father and Martin himself was threatened with not being allowed to study at a high school. He ended up at an high school focused on engineering and even managed to enrol at a university before the normalization period started in 1970. In 1972 he left for an internship in Soviet Union, witnessing the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union military parade. He undertook his military service from 1974 to 1977, serving two years at school and the last year in the barracks of the town of Sereď in Slovakia. Martin found work at the Centralprojekt Zlín company, collaborating with the architect Zdeněk Plesník, among others. He was assigned one of the Baťa appartments in Zlín. He was planning his emigration during the fifth year of his studies but managed to complete his plan only in 1982 when he left with his son through Yugoslavia to Austria and settled in Vienna; his wife joined him a year later. In Czechoslovakia he was convicted of abandoning the republic and was only able to return after the 1989 revolution.
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