Pavel Peška

* 1942

  • This was on a post in Wenceslas Square. When you’re facing the Horse [the riding statue of St. Wenceslas at the top of the square], about thirty meters left of it there was a flag post. And a kind of broomstick was sticking out of it. The other flag was Soviet, but no one was interested in it. This was on August 21, 1968. A huge crowd of people had gathered in Wenceslas Square. And I joined them. I climbed the post, three or four metres high, I hung off the broomstick and I tore it all down. Then we cruised the city on foot carrying that Czechoslovak flag. We told the Russians in Russian “go home!” and “there’s no counterrevolution!”. And the main thing we did was writing on the walls. We used white paint which comes off with difficulty. In Karlovo Square, I even asked the policeman in front of the local station: “Do you mind if I paint something on your wall?” And he just shrugged his shoulders and pointed at it. And so I put down this nasty sentence, I don’t even dare repeat it now. Tell me, I’m curious. It’s been such a long time, no one remembers anymore. Well, it said: Spit here. And there was a list of the names of Czechoslovak political representatives. The other writing was in Cyrillic – as we’d had many years of Russian at school – and they were insults of Brezhnev and other publicly known people of the time. Well, you could still read those words for quite a long time, until people had “normalised themselves”. So is it the flag you’re holding in your hand now? Did you bring it with you? Of course I did. I didn’t bring very many things, but the flag had to come with me. This is the original, genuine flag. It’ll stay with me till the end.

  • How did we get along with other Czechs… Well, we kept in touch with Czechs from the immediate area. Later, when we’d settled in a bit, people from all the surrounding towns including ours went to Zambezi on Friday nights. That was a Greek-run pub in Kempton Park. There were a couple of locals, but we would occupy a long table and we would sing. Everyone had dinner, we drank loads of beer, and we sang Czech songs. Starting with Rožňovské hodiny all the way to the more recent ones. Everyone was staring, and later people came specifically to have a listen to us. Those were great nights. Honza Šebesta mentioned some Railway Club. Is it the same thing, or is it something else? That was a different crowd, those were people living in Johannesburg. We don’t live far from Joburg, but we stuck to this particular social scene of people East of Joburg. There was a Railway Club and the local chef, I can’t remember his name now, he used to cook for Czechs. He served people dinner, we went there a couple of times. It was in Sturrock Park. Originally, it was a Railway Club and because he was their chef, it suited everyone, and we used to go there. And we were all Sokol members. We mainly organised summer camps. We did not exactly camp out, but we would hire a holiday resort with cabins. I was the chief of Sokol at the time, so it naturally fell to me, I was the organiser. I would book a certain number of cabins in the resort, people would pay me, and then we all met there. We organised entertainment for kids, all kinds of contests for them. The main aspect was social, though, we would sit around the campfire and chat and so on. So those were Sokol members. But then there were lots of other people who weren’t in Sokol. There was even something like a “tramp” club [a traditional movement in Czechoslovakia based around woodcraft values]. They bought their cabins in a completely different spot. The cabins always burnt down. They were outdoor kind of huts, thatched, and the thatching reached all the way down to the grass. And all it took was for the grass to catch fire and everything went up in flames. I figure they must’ve given up on it in the end. There were people around here who used to roam the wild with their guitars, but like I said, we were mostly family and a few friends and acquaintances from the immediate neighbourhood. And seeing as you were the chief, how did the local Sokol operate? Well, we had a mayor, a chief, and a treasurer. Everything was run in the correct way. We were joined with the Australian chapter. No one could understand why. Probably because there were not so many of us to rate a separate chapter. So, we had to report to the chapter. We didn’t have to pay any fees, that was all fair, but it was part of the organisational structure. And the mayor had unfortunately grown too big for his boots. He saw himself as a bit of a cult figure. He was so full of himself, he would come to the elections and say: “I’ll be the mayor or chairman for another term, thank you very much.” And the members didn’t like it, until it came to an actual clash about some money, apparently someone had been mugged and the organisation’s money went missing and there was a lot of bad blood about it. Our Sokol broke up. The former mayor founded another Sokol group as the old Sokol had dismissed him. Our old group existed a little longer, but interest was running thin. Every year there were fewer people willing to actually do something, and that was the end of it. Our chronicle is safely stored at the Czech embassy. It records all our trips, events, elections and such things. Even financial matters are recorded. All of that can be found at the embassy.

  • The very first training we had regarding the apartheid barely registered. It didn’t concern us. We were privileged in many areas, but in others we were restricted. For instance, when I got a job here – I have to tell you about this – I had to go three stops by train to get to work. I can say so much interesting stuff about this. In the beginning, because I didn’t have a clue, I simply got on the train I knew would take me to my destination, but I got thrown off straight away because that train was only for blacks and whites had no place there. Those were the most immediate experiences. Can you think of other such examples of coming up against the apartheid? Do tell me, this is really interesting. There were so many. Our first task was to learn what the apartheid was about. Even though I said that it didn’t concern us, we still had eyes, right? We could see that the policy was not about one group of inhabitants suppressing another one. The idea was as I have hinted to keep your own culture intact and not let another culture interfere with yours. But obviously the concept evolved in time, didn’t it. It went beyond the initially designated boundaries and got out of hand. That’s how it happened that when you went to the post-office, you had to queue in a white line. If there were public lavatories, which here in South Africa there were, some of them were intended for whites and some for blacks. Officially, blacks were referred to as Non-Europeans, whereas the others were Europeans. You’d walk into a park and there would be benches marked FOR EXCLUSIVE USE. This meant the exclusive use of white people. A black person couldn’t sit there. The park warden would drive the black guy out. He wouldn’t hit him or anything, but he would simply send him away because he wasn’t allowed to be there. Those were the rules. That was the state policy. In those days, blacks weren’t too keen on the arts. I don’t want to badmouth anyone but for instance, they didn’t have any clubs, didn’t go yachting on the lake. They didn’t go swimming, as they’re naturally more inclined towards running than swimming. And so the everyday life ran along these predefined tracks. As far as I know, there was no hatred among the individual races. I wasn’t aware of any. Alright, a cop may have kicked a black guy, that did happen, but… Or if he came across a drunken black man in the street, he simply picked him up, no questions asked. Didn’t want to know where he was from or what his job was. He wasn’t even supposed to be there I suppose. Because blacks were segregated, naturally the state had to look after them. Five million people cannot feed fifty million. Traditionally, they weren’t even encouraged to get an education. They did have their own university, their own schools, but again, it was a restricted school where whites had no place. Here’s a typical situation. A black woman in the street offered to clean our house for us. Alright, we brought her along, we walked together, and she said, “No, this isn’t right.” And she fell three steps behind us. She came along, we fed her and paid her. But she wouldn’t eat with us by the table or walk side by side with us. So simple it was. Take for example the year 1930 and imagine that a black person wanted to walk into a bar full of English officers. Can you imagine what would happen? And there was not even official apartheid policy in those days. It was simply the way of things since time immemorial, since the colonial times.

  • Everything was going well, until 1968 when everything came tumbling down and you had to reassess your life. You had to look at what you’re living in, where, and what quality of life people have abroad. We also had a natural aversion to everything socialist and we thought to ourselves: We don’t want our children growing up like this. We’ll do what it takes to stop that from happening. We packed everything, grabbed the kids, left the house. We left everything behind, including the house. All I’m hoping is that the house went to the people who had supported us financially at the time. And we applied for our passports and of course, the permission to travel, as a mere passport wouldn’t have been enough at the time. The office workers knew they would have to leave eventually, as would the government, so they worked overtime. The passport offices worked non-stop. And finally, we were issued ours, although it wasn’t until January 1969. And off we went. In those days, so many people were leaving Czechoslovakia that when we arrived in Vienna, we saw abandoned coaches. The drivers had fled. That was a common thing. So, we were travelling to Vienna on the train and the train arrived at the border. We’re showing our passports to the customs officer, and he asks our four-year-old son: “Where are you going, young man?” And he says: “Canada!” And my wife exclaims: “Oh no, we’re not going to Canada, we’ll be right back!” And the customs officer just looked us and said: “Oh, c’mon, you guys, please…”

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    Germiston, 04.05.2021

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We didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into. In South Africa, we felt like a fish out of water.

Pavel Peška still in Czechoslovakia
Pavel Peška still in Czechoslovakia
zdroj: Pavel Peška

Pavel Peška was born on August 10, 1942, in Prague. He graduated from a secondary school of mechanics in Mladá Boleslav and after his military service, started working at the Radioclub. There he met his wife Marie, who worked as a pilot for the Aeroclub Kladno in her free time. After the Warsaw Pact troops’ invasion in August 1968, Jaroslav joined the protests in Wenceslas Square. In January 1969, the Peškas travelled to Vienna, where they decided to continue to South Africa, which was at the time still receiving refugees from Czechoslovakia. For three consecutive terms, Pavel Peška was the chief of Sokol in Johannesburg. He worked at several South African technological companies and became the director of one of them. As of 1987, he started doing his own business in the electro-engineering field. He has lived in Gemiston outside of Johannesburg for more than 40 years and was still living there at the time of the interview in 2021.