Jiří Lejsek

* 1937

  • "The banner, which is now preserved in such a state, was hung in a cupboard during the war, and it must have been hammered in with boards somewhere in the closet. There it survived the whole war. How it was used for all the festivities, in 1948 at the gathering and at the festivities that were held here in Haratice or in Plavy. Then we protected it too. Then the Sokol was abolished. Haratice joined Plavy as one municipality, it was all liquidated and nobody remembered that the flag bearer carried the flag. It stayed with us, I protected it carefully and I didn't brag about it anywhere, until after 1989 when some unities were looking for it , those had its own banner destroyed or lost, so they borrowed it. So, when Sokol Velké Hamry went somewhere, they borrowed it and found it very nice. When there were festivities in Plavy, the mayor also borrowed this banner of mine."

  • "I remember it was spontaneous because it was in 1948. The enthusiasm of the people was real. Suddenly everything was possible. Everyone was practicing with joy. I remember that. Even me in those years I was excited to train there and to be able to show up at that Strahov. It was just the euphoria after the war. Suddenly, things could happen. And then the disappointment came."

  • "I was there in August 1968, we were on holiday in Poland by the sea, somewhere near Świnoujście. And there, while fishing, I met an engineer who told me to go home, that we wouldn't get home afterwards. He was right, on the 18th of August we went home and on the way we already saw soldiers somewhere. Immediately afterwards I became chairman of the civic committee in Haratice. Together with the chairman from Plavy, we put together a radio station so that we could inform the people. There I suddenly started a political era. I got into the municipal office as a councillor. But in 1969, normalization came and I didn't agree with what was happening. For example, they wanted to erase from the chronicle what the chronicler had written, so I opposed it. I got a thank you, a book, a letter, and my political career was over."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Liberec, 21.06.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:13:08
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The Lejsek family hid the Sokol banner from the Nazis and the Communists

Jiří Lejsek in 1955
Jiří Lejsek in 1955
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Jiří Lejsek was born on 19 April 1937 in Vysoké nad Jizerou and grew up in the village of Plavy-Haratice. In 1943, he started attending the local two-class municipal school and after the end of World War II, he entered the municipal school in Velké Hamry. Since he had shown musical talent from early childhood, he decided to continue his studies at the pedagogical department of the music school in Liberec in 1952 and took up piano. In 1957, he started his basic military service as a radio operator in Liberec and after its completion he got a job as a teacher at the music school in Tanvald, where he taught piano, harmonica and recorder. In 1972 he founded the music group Domestic, with which he made a number of trips abroad, most notably to the German Democratic Republic. Shortly before the fall of the communist regime in the autumn of 1989, he became the director of the Tanvald music school, a position he held until his retirement in 2018. At the time of the recording (2023), he lived in the village of Plavy-Haratice and served as chairman of the local organization of the Czech Anglers Union. We were able to record his story thanks to the support of the town of Tanvald.