Jiří Táborský

* 1934

  • "I knew the Secret Police officers, they were also in our company. But the ones we had in the company were really bad [laughs]. I wouldn't tell them anything. I even rode with one, he was my driver. His name was Viktor Brouzda. But we always went just for the books, so he was really bored, but he was there with me all the time."

  • "Of course we were investigated and we had to write something about it. I wrote that it was a terrible mistake that would cause damage to the socialist establishment [laughs]. Whereupon I was then reprimanded with a warning. But they didn't fire me."

  • "It was a big problem especially during the Heydrich era to hide these people somewhere in order to save their lives. Because Heydrich was one of the biggest German bastards. He was a truly horrible person. He did his best to destroy our nation. He did it in a very cunning way. For example, he allowed the workers who worked in pro-German factories to have all kinds of benefits - they got bonuses, extra food tickets, because during the war everything was on food tickets. And on the other hand, he tried to get rid of the intelligentsia."

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    Brno, 27.01.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:56:35
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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I didn‘t want to know the details. You can‘t give away what you don´t know.

Jiří Táborský in 2022
Jiří Táborský in 2022
zdroj: Post Bellum

Jiří Táborský was born on 7 April 1934 in Olomouc and spent the war years with his family in Prague. During the war, his father Jaroslav cooperated with the resistance organisation Central Leadership of the Home Resistance (ÚVOD). After the war, his father began working for the Czechoslovak army and the family had to move often. After the coup inFebruary 1948, the Communists convicted his uncle Josef Entner in a mock trial and he spent 15 years imprisoned. After finishing secondary school in Olomouc in 1952, Jiří started studying at the university in Brno. However, he was expelled two years later - probably for political reasons. From the mid-1950s he worked in the publishing house of the Czech Geological Survey (ČGÚ) in Brno, where he held the position of director. He secretly copied and bound banned books during night at work. Together with his wife Marie, he published more than 100 titles from the 1960s until 1989. He lived through the Velvet Revolution in Brno and retired in the 1990s. In 2022, Jiří Táborský lived in Brno.