Jiří Tomáš

* 1944

  • "I also worked in Lidová demokracie [People's Democracy journal - transl.], in sports, night shifts. I experienced the 20th of August 1968 there. Those night shifts consisted of one domestic political editor, one foreign political editor, a sports editor, and an editorial manager. At about half past eleven, the teleprinter started rattling, and a correspondent from Ostrava wrote that the Polish had breached the border barrier and were occupying Ostrava. The head of the edition got angry and said: 'What an asshole, he gets drunk and then sends news like this. If I were to include that in the edition, it would be trouble.' Well, the next day, it turned out he wasn't an asshole."

  • "We were managing eleven departments with eleven libraries. I was training the librarians and also buying the literature. There was quite a lot of money for it, and the conditions began to loosen up, so some quite interesting titles started coming out. I would buy Hemingway, for example, and also Hašek. I also organized discussions with the projection of Voskovec and Werich's films. We would always invite Jan Mikota, who worked as the press secretary of the Liberated Theatre, and he would bring some V + W film. And strangely enough, the soldiers liked it. It was actually the former PTP, the Auxiliary Technical Battalions. Then they disbanded them and made it a road army, so the guys did their weapons training there for the first six months and then worked on construction sites. And I worked in the book section. There was supposed to be a professional soldier. There were two jobs like that, a book methodologist and an aesthetic education methodologist, and since the professional soldiers didn't have the qualifications to do that, the conscripts did it. And the aesthetic education was carried out by Pavel Polák from Ypsilonka in Liberec."

  • "In 1990, the expenses were high, eighty to ninety thousand. Then it started to drop, of course. The market got saturated. Then we would also make perhaps only a thousand copies, or eight hundred, what would have been called bibliophilia before. We used to do, for example, Messalina or The Supermale by Apollinaire [editor's note - the author of the publications is Alfred Jarry]. We earned a million in those first three years. But the truth is that we also lost it because of a dishonest distributor. Some engineer named Rabas simply swindled us out of it."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 28.06.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 46:28
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

It‘s an outdated method to try to overcome the spirit through brutal violence...

Jiří Tomáš in the 1960s
Jiří Tomáš in the 1960s
zdroj: Witness archive

Jiří Tomáš was born on 17 November 1944 in Prague and grew up in northern Bohemia, where both his parents, Marie and Karel, devoted themselves to founding children‘s homes and special schools. Following his parents‘ example, he entered the Faculty of Education at Charles University in Prague in 1962 but got drawn to journalism. He served his military service in Liberec, where he worked as a book methodologist from 1965 to 1967. After returning to Prague, he began working as a journalist for Průboj, Lidová demokracie and Mladá fronta, for which he wrote articles on the rehabilitation of victims of the staged trials in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1969, he failed a political security background check and had to cease his career as a journalist. Until 1990, he worked as an editor and later as the editor-in-chief of the publishing house Novinář. In 1990, he founded the Akropolis publishing house, which is run today (2023) by his son Filip. In 2023, he lived in Prague.