Otakar Ryšavý

* 1955

  • "I was prepared for an artificial valve operation, which was done in 1991 or 1992, I was lying in the hospital at Karlovo náměstí because of it. And they didn't know what to do with me because they didn't know yet what had caused me to lose about twenty kilograms and not be able to breathe. And I was just a complete wreck and I couldn't do anything. Well, and there was the demonstration! And I got, somehow I impetrated, a discharge from the hospital. But I was terribly weak. And now I walked out of that hospital and suddenly they started rushing it there. And I suddenly realised that I couldn't keep up because I was just completely exhausted, I wasn't able to run. And at that moment, I felt like, if you remember from Čapek’s Tales From Two Pockets, how Průcha, when he was released from the prison and went, ‘Wow, wow…’ That’s the state I was in. And now I was just waiting for someone to suddenly come... and I would get hit as I did in 1969, like a fourteen-year-old boy. Miraculously, nothing happened. I literally walked, this is how I crept because I wasn't able to do anything else. Everyone was already running away, and I walked, and I was very glad I could come back to the hospital.”

  • “Then the filming came about in that apartment at my place. There was a sound engineer, a certain Jirka Mergl, a certain Zdeněk Novák, Michal Hýbek, who did the camera work, and me. I did the service and sandwiches on Letná. Mr Havel polished it off - the whole bowl, he must have been hungry. And it was done in that hidden way, that's why I call it The Wages of Fear, it reminds me of this movie. Because he actually had to go around the block once, then the second time around the block, and only the third time he went to my apartment where it was filmed. It was shot in the form of questions, that he was sitting on the sofa, it is also there written in those letters, he is sitting on the sofa and his friend, Zdeněk Novák, asks him questions and he answers. It's in that movie, isn't it? They had to be careful, they had a spyhole, if you remember, and we had that too on the door, a kind of peephole. Well, strangely enough, it passed without any canaries coming to me. That didn't happen, luckily.”

  • “In 1969, I went to the cinema on Wenceslas Square. And in that cinema, they were showing Death in the Red Jaguar. That was Jerry Cotton, that was an American agent. That movie - I'll tell you what it was about. I said: 'I have to go see it.' Well, I went to see it, I was fourteen. I should not have gone to it yet, because there was an age limit - from 15, but I got there. I took a tall fur hat and somehow sneaked in there. I said to myself, ‘I have to go see Jerry Cotton.’ Well, now I was getting out of that movie theatre, it was the anniversary of August 21, 1969. Well, and I'm leaving Yalta (it was in Yalta, I don't know if that movie theatre is still there today. It actually is, it still works), I come out of the passage, and I see a large gathering of crowds around the Statue of Saint Wenceslas. ‘Gestapo! Gestapo!’ people shouted, and all sorts of things, at the policemen who were there, the militiamen were there too, and I just happened to be there, out of curiosity, I wanted to know what was happening there... And suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, I got hit in the back of the head with a baton. I knelt on my knees, the pain was simply terrible, now I started to cry and scream because I was small, no one had ever beaten me or anything like that before. When I recovered from that, my aunt lived on Vlkova street in Žižkov, so I somehow made my way through the crowd, and when I got out of it, I went to my aunt. My aunt kept me at hers for two days. Because when I explained it to her, she said, ‘You're not going anywhere now, you're going to stay here,’ and then my parents picked me up, they got me from there, from my aunt. But I was there for two days. And that was the first time I thought, ‘Why? What's happening? Why are they beating me?’”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 15.02.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:09:13
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Praha, 01.03.2022

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    délka: 01:19:30
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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You can choose shashlik or steak. I choose America!

Otakar Ryšavý
Otakar Ryšavý
zdroj: Witness archive

Otakar Ryšavý was born in Prague on 30 April 1955 to his parents Otakar and Olga Ryšavý. He spent his childhood years in Prague‘s Holešovice and at the family cottage in Horní Maxov. A significant moment in his personal life direction was an experience on August 21 1969. On his way from the cinema, he got involved in a demonstration on Wenceslas Square, where he was hit by a baton of the „orderly forces“. He trained to be a turner in Aritma Vokovice but was mostly employed in cleaning companies. He found his friends among people who opposed the communist regime, he liked to attend concerts by independent artists. Among his closest friends was the cameraman Michal Hýbek, with whom he collaborated on the filming of a documentary on Václav Havel. Otakar Ryšavý is a man of a free spirit, a friend of life and western values. He lives and works in his native Holešovice (2022).