Doc. Jan Klíma

* 1943

  • "When the war started, it was immediately apparent, the machine guns started drilling holes in the block of flats, it blew off a ledge of the wall. So we were wondering what to do because the order was to defend the so called secret code. The code is the sacred room upstairs where encrypted messages were sent to the Prague headquarters. We wanted to defend the code, and the experienced Portuguese told us: For God's sake don't do that, crawl not completely into the ground floor, because they can kill you there, but somewhere on the first floor, where you have two walls on each side, because there they build thin walls, so that one side, if it was shot through, you have to have two walls. That was just the first floor corridor, so we were lying in that corridor, cooking, sleeping and more or less working. And in the meantime, the Luanda war was going on, which was quite terrible. There were machine guns barking. They forgot to turn off the phone so we could talk on the phone. So we called Prague and told them it was bad. The Bulgarians called us that they had dead people, they had no connection to Sofia, call Prague, they needed to evacuate. Now it was going on and we spent three days and two nights in that corridor looking for some help, it was clear that the city was going to be destroyed and there were going to be piles of dead and at least the sanitary situation was going to be in shambles and we might not survive it and if we survived it, that nobody would break into our house and kill us."

  • "We were going to Bulgaria through Yugoslavia at that time and I remember in Yugoslavia I bought, Yugoslavia was such a strange country, so I bought an American Time magazine there. I still have that Time from the '68 at home. And there was a double-page saying that in a fortnight the Soviets and others would occupy Czechoslovakia, and there was a map drawn on it. And we thought, what rubbish they were making up. We came home and three days later it was August 21. And the map was exactly right for the occupation. So it was very interesting. We watched it in amazement."

  • "The way the war manifested itself there was that we were on a line where there was a road, a railway, an oil pipeline from the coast from Beira to Mutare in Zimbabwe, it used to be called Unkali, and all this was guarded by Zimbabwean soldiers to keep the Beira corridor under control. But it was guarded by black Zimbabwean soldiers who weren't very disciplined, so I've had situations like that, I went into a village on a Saturday to talk to people and take pictures and all of a sudden there was gunfire going around and I lay down on the ground and I watched the dirt being sprayed around and I prayed that I wouldn't get hit. Then we ran home and found out what was going on. The Zimbabwean soldiers had gotten drunk because they had a liquor called Nipa, and they were breaking off the tops of the cartridges and puttiung gunpowder into it to make it even stronger, and they got very drunk. And just for the fun of it, they were shooting heavy machine guns around. So there was sometimes a problem of survival even because of the "friendly" soldiers, let alone the bandits, which was a hostile organization."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Vysoké Mýto, 17.01.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 48:19
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Hradec Králové, 09.08.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:39:43
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - HRK REG ED
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

He was an interpreter and an intelligence officer in Africa. He survived a bloody massacre there

Jan Klíma, 1973
Jan Klíma, 1973
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Jan Klíma was born on 8 December 1943 in Vysoké Mýto. Two uncles were involved in the resistance during World War II, one of them was executed by the Nazis. The other one returned from the concentration camp in poor health. His father worked as a church choir director and brought his son to music. His mother ran a photography studio in Vysoké Mýto. After the victory of communism, pressure grew to nationalize her trade, but she resisted until the early 1960s. The witness managed to study pedagogy and history and taught at primary, secondary and later university level. He took part in protests against the occupation by the Warsaw Pact armies and in a spontaneous demonstration in Vysoké Mýto to celebrate the victory of the Czechoslovak hockey team over the Soviets at the 1969 World Championship. In the same year he was able to visit Germany and thought about emigrating. As he could speak several languages, including Portuguese, he was offered a job as a translator in Mozambique in the 1980s. At the same time, he was approached by military counter-intelligence and he became its collaborator. According to his own words, he was just reporting on the situation in Mozambique. After 1989, he became an employee of the Foreign Ministry and went to Luanda, Angola, as secretary of the Czechoslovak embassy. In Luanda, he lived through the outbreak of a brutal civil war. In Mozambique and Angola he experienced many dangerous situations and hardships. In 1993, he joined the University of Hradec Králové, where he stayed until 2021, when he retired. He taught international relations and Latin American and African history. In 2022 he was living in Vysoké Mýto.