Jindřich Malý

* 1957

  • "The emigrant dream is this thing... when you made it to the other side of the Iron Curtain and you were basically living the life you dreamed of, which meant you could travel, study, ski, go to Austria for a weekend, etc. We take it all for granted nowadays but it was not back then. I knew that if I crossed that border, I would be arrested. I would go to jail and probably never get out again. And this knowledge got stuck somewhere in my subconscious mind and I had these dreams at night. Most emigrants had these kind of dreams. I remember one dream in particular: I was in Munich and suddenly a truck stopped and the driver said, 'Listen, I can't go there, could you take the truck to Prague?' I didn't have a licence for the truck, but I drove the truck to Prague, handed it over and suddenly I realized, 'Oh Jeez, I'm on the other side.' It was dreams like that, when you woke up and you felt relived, 'Thank God that didn't happen.' These are the dreams of emigrants.

  • "At three o'clock in the morning, on 21 August, I heard a terrible noise outside. I went down to the kitchen and there were my parents and a man sitting by the radio listening. And there we heard what we all know: 'Czech Radio is calling, we've been occupied by the Allied troops,' and Russian tanks were driving past our house. We lived on this right-hand bend, and it was a terrible noise, because the tank always came into the bend and had to turn around with the tracks. I can still hear the sound. It was convoys of tanks that were passing by. Fortunately, what happened in Karlovy Vary was that the officer in charge of that Russian army was in Karlovy Vary several times for medical treatment, so he didn't allow those tanks to enter the spa district. They occupied Karlovy Vary all around, but the Russian tanks did not enter the spa district, which supposedly prevented the springs all around from collapsing, so that saved an awful lot. However, there was a bridge a short distance away where a Russian tank fell through, this happened in Karlovy Vary-Dvory. And we used to go and watch it because it was about two kilometres from us. The tank just fell in, and then they were pulling it out of that sunken bridge. Another situation in Karlovy Vary, two convoys went to the Cheb bridge and they drove opposite each other, and they thought they were enemies so started shooting at each other. So these are my memories of occupation."

  • "It was Saturday morning, I was in Munich and I thought I would go and buy something to eat. So I went to the city centre and there were these department stores. For us of course, it was something unbelievable – the amount of goods everywhere. I went to the food section. And there were two beautifully dressed ladies and they were speaking Czech. And I said, 'Hello, sorry to disturb you, I just emigrated and I don't know what to do.' And one of them replied, 'Maybe I can help you, there's an organization called the American fund for Czechoslovak refugees that helps emigrants.' And she gave me a phone number and address. Then I slept in the park for two days, it was summer, so I slept on a park bench, and on Monday morning I visited the organization."

  • "They took my papers. He left and came back with my passport and the papers and said, 'Get off the train. It's not in the interest of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic for you to leave the country.' So we got off the train. The train went on and we were standing on the Slovak-Hungarian border wondering what was going to happen next. We sat until the morning, from about midnight to the morning, in that waiting room at that police station that was at that railway station. In the morning, an official came. And I handled the situation really well because my father was working as a journalist in an army magazine. So I went to talk to this official - and I didn't even know the ranks, but I went to see him, he was a men in his sixties at the time, older than I am today, because he was white-haired. He was sitting there and I walked in and I said, `Hello, comrade captain. There must have been some mistake, my father works for the army. This is some kind of a misunderstanding.' And the men was nice, he was an older gentleman. He offered me coffee, and we talked."

  • "So I took the entrance exams to the secondary school of economics, distance learning, at Vinohradská třída. I passed the exams there and started studying in September. I was twenty-one years old then. September started, I went to my first class and the first class was a Russian class. And the teacher said in Russian: ' Zdravstvujtě, tovarišči' (Hello, comrades). And she started speaking to us in Russian right away. It made me feel sick and I said to myself, 'No, I'm not doing this anymore'. And I got up and I said, 'Do svidanija, tovarišči' (Goodbye, comrades) And I left the class and the school. And I knew it was the last straw, I knew I had to leave, I didn't want to be here anymore, I felt strongly about it. I'm an emotional person and that was a strong emotion for me. I wanted to complete my education, to be educated like my friends, so I enrolled the school and instead of teaching me maths or physics, they were talking to me in Russian. I had enough!"

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I felt strongly that I couldn‘t live here any longer

Jindřich Malý in 2021
Jindřich Malý in 2021
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Jindřich Malý was born on 18 July 1957 in Karlovy Vary. When he was two years old, his parents divorced, his mother remarried and had three more children. The relationship with his stepfather gradually deteriorated, when he changed his opinions after 1968, joined the government line and became a convinced communist. Jindřich‘s life was greatly influenced by his grandfather, his mother‘s father, who was a political prisoner in Jáchymov. Jindřich had skied since childhood and skiing became his livelihood in emigration. After 1968, which he felt strongly about even as a child, he felt the coming normalisation and knew that he did not want to live here. He became part of the underground and wore his hair long in protest. Jindřich did his military service in Dukla Club in Prague and wanted to complete his secondary school education. However, at school, he was irritated by a Russian class and decided to emigrate from the country. In 1979 he managed to leave via Hungary to Yugoslavia and then to Munich. There he settled down, found a job and competed in skiing. He worked successively for two ski manufacturing companies, went to World Cups as a service man and even went to the 1988 Olympics in Calgary. After the Velvet Revolution he started a business in Czechoslovakia and returned permanently from emigration in 1993. He later sold his company and bought a property just outside of Prague where he built a hotel with a golf course where he still lives today (2021).