Josef Londa

* 1951

  • "The police were pushing the people out, of course: 'No assembly. There were protesters who disagree with the government, with the invasion. They had various raids. Then the cars with the people's militia came there. They were doing these cordons, the square was full of people, it was clear that the cops couldn't handle it. I remember they had these green suits and long white batons, I hadn't seen that until then. And now they made a swarm and shouted: 'Meter-long alleys and gas!' And they were throwing the gas and running and hitting, banging the people with the batons. We were running, and there was a pub in the middle of Wenceslas Square, and you go there down by stairs. And when the policemen were chasing us, the owner opened the door and about twenty of us piled into the pub. We waited for the swarm to pass, as they pushed people down under the Můstek across Wenceslas Square. We waited for them to run through, then we went back up to the horse and from there they chased us out, so we went to the station."

  • "They farmed the land, one could say very skilfully and sensibly. They were quite rich because of that. They knew how to farm. Those Ukrainians, those men, had no education at that time, and they brought their education from Bohemia, so they knew how to work the land, how to fertilise it. My mother told me that the Ukrainians laughed at them, that they exported the soil to the field and ploughed the manure, that they will make the field 'dirty'. When the Ukrainians were farming and they had a lot of manure, they would let it dry and burn it. And our people, as part of their farming, bought the manure from them and they laughed at them, saying that they hadn't seen it before how they were going to make the land dirty."

  • "When my parents worked in an agricultural cooperative and we lived in Paseka, the chairman of the cooperative was a man named Jaroslav Niče. He was also a Volhynian, he also came back from Volhynia after the war and he got into the National Assembly as a deputy. He was in contact with my parents, they used to visit each other. I was very happy to listen to them talking, when he would say, for example, observations from that National Assembly. How it was run under the Communists and how they ran it. So, I loved to listen to that. And one time I remember saying: 'Okay, but the system has to change,' and he said: 'An individual alone will do nothing. You have to get together and make a deal. Make more of you, otherwise you can't do anything. I know what's going on there, somehow, some way, it's all ordered, we just sit there and raise our hands.' And he said to me once, it may be happening today, that maybe when they had to pass some bills, some proposals that were not unanimous: 'They offered us so much money. If you raise your hand, you won't have to do anything for the rest of your life.'"

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    Olomouc, 18.08.2021

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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It was too hard to oppose the regime

Josef Londa in 1968
Josef Londa in 1968
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Josef Londa was born on 21 March 1951 in Paseka near Šternberk. His parents, Anna and Antonín Londa, had already gone through one marriage during the World War II and lost their partners under dramatic circumstances. Antonín Londa was tried in 1944 for the unallowed slaughter of a pig in Kounicovy‘s dormitory in Brno and from there deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. His brother Tomáš and Josef’s first wife Eliška were arrested by the Gestapo in January 1945 because the family was helping partisans in the meadows near Hošťálková. Both of them disappeared without a trace behind the gates of the Kounicovy dormitories. Josef‘s mother Anna was one of the Volhynian Czechs who were to be taken to the gulag as kulaks by the Stalinist regime. Thanks to the 1946 repatriation agreement, Anna was able to return to Czechoslovakia, free of all her possessions, where she met Antonín Londa in Paseka near Šternberk and together they started a family. Their son Josef grew up on the farm, which in 1956 the family had to hand over to a unified agricultural cooperative. After his application to the secondary industrial school in Olomouc was rejected, he was trained as an electrical fitter at Uničovské strojírny. On 21 August 1969, on his way back from an assembly plant in northern Bohemia, he accidentally found himself in the middle of a demonstration on Prague‘s Wenceslas Square. In order to complete his secondary education, he joined the Communist Party as a candidate during the 1970s under pressure from his superior. During the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he actively participated in the proliferation of leaflets and the preparation of the general strike. Josef Londa was living with his wife Ludmila in a family house in Šternberk in 2021.