Josef Kyska

* 1954

  • "We were trained like that from the very beginning, no first names and certainly no last names. Telephone numbers as far as possible should only be remembered, not written down. Addresses as far as possible should also be remembered, not written down. If we had to have addresses, we were expected to reduce the notes in order to not endanger anyone. Because there were a lot of students who were actually regular students. I only had links to them, in that I wasn't a student, but I was already working. I was just friends with them. For many of them, it resulted in expulsion from their studies. Not only from the faculty, but they were unable to study at any university in the whole of Czechoslovakia. So the measures were very, very strong. We often didn't even know the surname. Just this is Maja, this is Beata - who? It was so deliberately done, God forbid that somebody should give somebody away. The caution was great, because the church, and the underground church in general, was the number one enemy of the state. Of course there was the official church, it could say masses and that was all. This [the underground church] was beyond the control of state security. The state security was interested in infiltrating. Amazingly, it also worked in such a way that the state security tried to infiltrate and plant its spies among these young people. It really worked amazingly well that immediately there was a warning, I remember it to this day, as the photo was circulating, watch out for this one, he's a spy. What channels it went through - I don't know."

  • "My brother is a civil engineer. He worked as a senior designer in a big company in Bratislava. This company - CHEMPIK, which [was] in the chemical industry, paper industry and [produced] chemical fibers, had contacts in Holland, Germany and Canada. My brother, he's 15 years older than me, what an impact that had on him - from time to time he could travel from the company for some time to Germany, to Holland, he had a service passport. Well, what happened, my brother, who was supposed to go to Canada in the same year, 1977, on business, had his passport taken away. From then on he was never allowed to travel again, well, not never, but for a long time, until after the revolution he was allowed to go to the West."

  • "My colleague said, 'You know what, I have a feeling you're not coming back'. Well, it made me shudder - God forbid a bike should do that! Then another colleague in the canteen said, 'This is the best opportunity to escape, to emigrate, to go to the World Cup'. I didn't know what he meant. The colleague I was talking about was still saying, 'I'll see if you're going to Vienna alone'."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 09.01.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:52:10
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

One shall rise above that, which cannot be changed

Memoir shortly after emigration, Vienna, 1977
Memoir shortly after emigration, Vienna, 1977
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Josef Kyska (formerly Kyška) was born in Partyzánské, formerly Batovany, on the seventh of February 1954 into a well-established family. Josef Kyska‘s father was already a high-ranking manager in the local Bata plants before February 1948. Due to his expertise and experience, he remained in his position even after the communist takeover. Even so, due to his bourgeois background, the young Josef Kyska was subjected to bullying at school by committed teachers. His struggles with the communist establishment culminated in several refusals to study at university, despite his efforts to improve his cadre profile by working in the blue-collar professions. The decision to flee abroad became more and more mature in a young, thoughtful man with a desire for self-realisation. Thanks to contacts in the underground church of which he was a part, he was able to prepare a plan for emigration to Austria. Under the pretext of attending the hockey championship in Vienna, he managed to leave the Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1977. In Vienna, under dramatic circumstances, he escaped from the trip and applied for asylum. He later studied philosophy and theology at the University of Vienna. After his studies he taught at secondary and higher education institutions. He married and started a family in Austria. In 2023, he was still living in Austria.