Ladislav Tomas

* 1937

  • "They weren't very organized, the one who was in charge, I remember him, he was a very special lieutenant. I was just losing my nerves because the ceiling was burning through and we didn't know how it was above us. We didn´t deal with that. So we were just watching. Standa, he had stronger nerve and I was losing it, so I just yelled at them that hopefully they were there to help us move the transmitter. So they obeyed and the soldiers started carrying it until they took it all away. And all that was left was a metal cabinet, and that was quite a powerful piece of equipment, so there had to be TV reception, re-modulation to channel eight, and then to the antenna towards Liberec. We were a little bit worried about getting it out, because if it got caught between the doors, because it was quite big, like a three-piece metal cabinet, we might have had to jump out of the window. There would be nothing else to do. Fortunately, the soldiers pulled it out."

  • "We dismantled the individual panels of the TV transmitter, there were actually three posts in a metal box, and we had help from the participants of a ski course, both men and women, and even the women were queuing up, and as soon as we unscrewed a panel, they were picking it up properly and carrying it to a room near the cable car. Only soon an order came and they politely apologized that they were called off, that they had to leave because they had secured accommodation for them, and that the army would replace us."

  • "The cable car took us up. There were three or four people and about six or eight fire extinguishers. And they [firemen] themselves were talking about the fact that the firemen´s chief said that Ještěd [chalet] was going to be burnt down. It was incredibly covered in snow there and the only way up and down was by that cable car. So we got up there, and in the meantime the guys had already unscrewed the twenty-three channel repeater so that it couldn't burn. "

  • "Prague had its alternative places, that had been taken into account, and when the Soviet troops occupied the radio, they started broadcasting from somewhere else. And they were able to get it everywhere by those cables. And that was done by the guys who were in the long-distance cable administration in Prague, where the radio service was under that administration. And so they were able to broadcast all the time, change places and always send it. And when, for example, Hradec came on the air, we never checked anything, we never introduced ourselves, because it was too dangerous, because we didn't know who, what, so that somebody wouldn't say something, so we just put a different modulation, or when Vratislavice stopped having modulation, we put another modulation that came from Prague."

  • "They checked on us, they did it smartly, for example some programs that were broadcast, so we had to, we were directly ordered to record them on a tape recorder, because they were afraid. No one really understood it, that was a big advantage for us, [they were scared] that by chance somebody would connect from elsewhere and some transmitter would broadcast something else than Prague."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Studio PN v Liberci, 20.06.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:02:09
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Transmitters were his life. He helped spread the news of the occupation

Ladislav Tomas at the repeater station in Liberec Pavlovice in 1982
Ladislav Tomas at the repeater station in Liberec Pavlovice in 1982
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Ladislav Tomas was born on 20 May 1937 in Studnice near Paceřice in the Turnov region. His father, Ladislav Tomas, was a trained carpenter, but he was mainly engaged in farming and also in jewellery making. His mother Bohuslava Tomasová, née Flanderková, was a housewife. His mother was arrested in 1942 during the period after the assassination of Heydrich and imprisoned for several months for having winter felt boots sent to her sisters and neighbours by a friend from another region. She was even put on death row in Pankrác in Prague due to lack of space. Through a Prague lawyer, Ladislav Růžek, she was eventually allowed to serve her sentence in prison in Liberec. Both parents joined the Communist Party after the war. After the Communists took away their fields and orchard in the mid-1950s, his father left the party. The Communists expelled his mother from the Communist Party after the 1969 background checks because she disagreed with the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Ladislav Tomas was interested in transmission technology from childhood, for example he made his own crystal radio. In 1952, he started studying at the Higher Technical School of Automotive Engineering in Mladá Boleslav, and after two years he switched to the Secondary Technical School of Electrical Engineering in Prague, where he graduated and passed his qualification exams in 1956. He served his basic two-year military service with the signallers in Slaný, Pardubice and Dašice, where he completed non-commissioned officers‘ school. After the war, he joined the Amplification Station 1 of the Long Distance Communications Administration in Liberec as a technician. On 31 January 1963, together with his colleague Stanislav Tomiška, he rescued a television transmitter from the burning mountain chalet on Ještěd dating back to 1907. Thanks to their efforts, the radio communications technicians managed to restore television broadcasting just two weeks later. In August 1968, at the time of the occupation of Liberec by the Warsaw Pact armies led by the Soviet Union, the radio operators also provided Czechoslovak Radio with broadcasts from alternative locations from which the radio carried out broadcasting after the occupation of the building on Vinohradská třída in Prague. Ladislav Tomas also cooperated with the radio studio in Alšova Street in Liberec, where Václav Havel and Jan Tříska prepared their anti-occupation broadcasts. Throughout his professional life, Ladislav Tomas, together with his subordinates, provided long-distance intercity and foreign telephone traffic at the Liberec amplification station. They also provided radio broadcasts, such as concerts, speeches and sports broadcasts. Ladislav Tomas retired in 1997. In 2023 he was living in the Broumovská housing estate in Liberec.