Jakub Matulík

* 1942

  • “The neighbour came by saying that her thirteen-year-old daughter had a forty-degree fever and that the ambulance couldn’t come for her because they were out of gas. So we stuck the child and her mother into our car and took them sixty kilometres to hospital. [We crossed] two lines of the front and also the state border. So we got them to the hospital and they said: ‘You can go now.’ And I said: ‘And how are you dumbos planning on getting back?’ So I took them back home as well, we left the child in the hospital. And the next day (all over the town in our vicinity, whenever we would go outside, there would be boys throwing stones at us), and that morning after we had taken them, one boy threw a stone at us again, but his dad charged up and whopped him one! And since then we weren’t [just] ‘priatelé’ (friends), we were ‘naši’ (ours, family).”

  • “It wasn’t always as funny as how I just described it. About a week after this first case, we were on our way to inspect some place because of shooting there. I was sitting behind the steering wheel, so I was looking more attentively than my two colleagues, and so with my peripheral vision I noticed that to our left a group of some six masked people got up from the field and started shaking their weapons and firing. And they were firing exactly precisely in the direction of our car. But not directly at the car, it was about five ten metres in front of it and about one, two metres behind. So it ended up okay, as they only had SMGs and rifles. And then we were driving through a derelict settlement, I don’t want to call it a village as it was just a few houses, and I guess they had something there that they didn’t want us to see. So they shot at our car, and this time the whomp was different than when light infantry weapons fire. So I put on the brake and looked to see what was going on, and a mortar shell had jammed itself into the wall about a metre above our car. Hard to say if it had a calibre of hundred-and-five or hundred-and-twenty, because I didn’t really have time to measure it... I saw how things were, stepped on the gas and got the car moving. The recommended speed for that road was forty (kilometres per hour), I went eighty.”

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    Praha Dejvice, 20.09.2012

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If you’re doing something, do it properly. Especially when the lives of other people depend on it

UNPROFOR mission
UNPROFOR mission
zdroj: Archív pmětníka

Jakub Matulík was born on 6 July 1942 in the village of Ladná near Břeclav. In 1960 he began a two-year course at the Military School of Flight Mechanics in Košice. After graduating he served as a warrant officer at Mošnov Airport. But he wanted to improve his education, and so he left to the Higher Vocational School of Aviation in Košice for another year. He completed the school in 1966 with the rank of lieutenant. He then spent five years at the Faculty of Aviation of the Military Academy of Antonín Zápotocký in Brno (1968-1973). This high-level qualification enabled him to become chief of the operations department at Mošnov Airport. While stationed there he experienced a tragic event - an air-plane crash in which ten people, his close colleagues, died. Even so he remained in aviation. In 1982 he became an inspector of the military transport air force in Prague. In 1988 he moved on to the Ministry of Defence as the Chief Senior Officer of the Permanent Committee for Flight Safety of the Air Command of the Federal Ministry of National Defence. In 1990 he became a member of the Technical Committee of the Warsaw Pact in Moscow, and he was there when the military pact was dissolved four months later. In 1992 and 1993 he took part in the Yugoslavia mission as a UN military observer. Upon his return he worked at the Department of Foreign Relations of the Ministry of Defence. Thanks to his knowledge of foreign languages he was appointed Chief Senior Officer of the Department for NATO Member State Relations of the Ministry of Defence, which was connected to the Partnership for Peace programme. When his period of service was over, he remained there as a civil employee. Finally, he worked at a detached workplace of the ministry, where he issued certificates of participation in military missions abroad under Czech Law No. 255/1946 Coll. He is married since 1968, he has one daughter and one son.