Jaromír Pomahač

* 1940

  • "Of course, as a man, I longed for a car. So I saved up. So I had to make a deposit of 20,000. There was a Mototechna [official car shops] in Vinohrady, so I had to put down 20,000 there, to make deposit for Mototechna. I waited two years for the car, so I used to go there for two years to look at the list, when it would be my turn. I waited two years for that. And then I went to queue in Vysočany and that's where I got the car. But I wasn´t given it! It cost about 49,000 at the time. It was a Škoda 100."

  • "Well, I remember that. We were just going to Děčín. My aunt and I were going to Hřensko to see it and the news caught us on the train, about the currency reform. I know that in Hřensko, when we were there, people were throwing bank notes into springs and streams. And I know that a roll cost fifty crowns, [it was something] those days! When a roll had cost thirty pennies then, and then in that currency it cost fifty crowns. People were getting rid of all the money they had, nothing was available, everything was bought up."

  • "Because it was such a huge internal force that nobody could do it today. They'd have had to shoot up all Prague, so to speak. If you imagine a full Letná plain. That was a huge crowd. It was a full Wenceslas Square, people couldn't even fit on Wenceslas Square, they were in the side streets. It was a huge crowd, it was just impossible. They say that there was [People´s] Militia ready behind Prague, but nobody dared to do anything at that time. I don't know, that would have been terrible. It would have been fratricide, that's what it would have been."

  • "My dad was a businessman, so he had this anti-communist mood, really. So he was... for example, he banned me from Pioneer organization membership and so on. And I remember that when the trial of Dr. Horáková was in that fifty-one, fifty-two year, my dad was listening to it on the radio. There wasn't television, nothing, just listening to the radio. And dad was also still tuning in to Free Europe, and it was so confusing. It was very confusing for me, but I remember my dad swearing, saying that they were murderers because they sentenced a woman to death. That never happened in the world."

  • "So he took me on his bicycle and we went there to see, and as we were approaching the railway station, suddenly strike fighters [turned up], aircrafts. They were called also „boiler“ aircrafts, they were these strike fighters that were tasked with destroying the locomotive, so they shot the boiler through and the machine was broken, it was just incapable of moving. And they were always making weird hooting sound, so they were hooting, and then they made an air raid. And our dad, my dad, I mean, he pushed me off the bike into a ditch and lay on me. I remember that like it was today."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 12.06.2018

    (audio)
    délka: 46:33
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    ED studio Praha, 05.06.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 46:12
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

When the national anthem plays, tears well up in my eyes

Jaromír Pomahač during his military service, Prague, 1960
Jaromír Pomahač during his military service, Prague, 1960
zdroj: Jaromír Pomahač´s archive

Jaromír Pomahač was born on 8 December 1940 in Prague. At the end of the World War II he experienced air raids by ground attack fighters at the Malešice railway station, a plane crash into the Rokytka stream in Hrdlořeze and the bombing of Vysočany. He witnessed a firefight between General Vlasov‘s troops and German soldiers. In 1948 he participated in the XIth Sokol Meeting. His parents worked in a grocery shop, which they voluntarily closed down in 1948. Later, however, his non-worker background contributed to him not being admitted to [secondary] school. He trained as a turner and worked all his life in the Technometra Radotín company. In the 1950s, his father voluntareed to work for two years on an excavator in the mine in Ervěnice so that the family could obtain an apartment in Prague. Until the war the witness played football for Dynamo Motol team. He spent his military service at the Border and Internal Guard, mostly serving as a driver at the headquarters in Prague. Because of The Second Berlin Crisis, he had to stay three months longer in the army. He protested against the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. He also attended the funeral of Jan Palach. After August 1968, he left trade unions, then called Revolutionary Trade Union Movement (ROH). At Technometra, he participated in the production of undercarriage for L-29 Dolphin and L-39 Albatros aircrafts. He and his wife raised two daughters. In June 2021 he was living in Prague.