Josef Tomášek

* 1936

  • “Partisans from Ledeč who in my opinion did not excel, fooled people into thinking that it was the end of the war. However, it was not. Everyone was feeling joy, took the Czech flags out, went to the square. We walked past the Kuželovna restaurant where the German patrol used to always stand, we were marching around the square, so the Germans were holed up. They also heard that it was the end of the war. We were marching around the square until a message arrived that it was not officially the end of the war and that a German garrison was approaching from Humpolec to restore order. Everyone dispersed, the German soldiers were again patrolling in front of the Kuželovna restaurant and were looking at us victoriously as we had been fooled.

  • “I can still remember that the Nazis searched every flat in Libeň. Two SA officers, Brownshirts went together, two of them came to a room where I and my brother were sleeping and one was standing over us. My father had to show the other one around the flat (to show) that nobody was hiding there. I remember that the SA man who was guarding us behaved himself. He was making funny faces, wearing glasses, and was winking at us. He was making us calm this way, it was probably a decent person even though he was a member of the storm troop.”

  • “(I joined) right after the war when (the troop) on Libeňský Island was founded. There was troop number twenty-five, a Pepijá was the leader and also Míla Vlk and Rakša. Rakša was the leader of us, cub scouts; Míla Vlk was the leader of the 253rd troop with which I used to go to camps. I attended it until the end, I think that it survived until 1951. The Czech Union of Youth took our clubroom. We used to go there at night and knock on the doors and shout at them to get lost and that it wasn´t theirs. But we had to run away every time because communists were already in the saddle...”

  • “The whole Vinohradská Street was full of demonstrating people, we were going down the street. A swarm of Russian soldiers was walking against us with machine guns pointing up. We were walking against them as if we were going to break it through but they were walking against us with the machine guns, they started shooting in the air, trolley wires started to fall on us, they cut the wires by shooting. They were falling on us. Fortunately, I do not know that someone stayed there, but we had to disperse the crowd. It was dangerous there.”

  • “Then I was in Cetviny, it was a company behind the wires on Austrian borders which were busier than the borders with Germany. They were guarded so thoroughly that nobody dared to go there. Unfortunately, I helped a man and a woman who had been electrocuted. As the alarm group, we ran past the wires, because a short circuit had been reported. Fortunately, the discharge threw them off the wires, off the conductor. I talked to them, they were from Ostrava, they then took them to interrogation. I do not know what happened with them after it.”

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    Praha, 13.08.2021

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The event impressed itself on my mind

Old Scout Josef Tomášek at the St. Nicholas meeting in 2000
Old Scout Josef Tomášek at the St. Nicholas meeting in 2000
zdroj: witness´s archive

Josef Tomášek was born on 7 January 1936 in Prague. He lived with his parents in Prague in Libeň, in May 1942, he experienced the search for the assassins of the acting Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich and their associates. One of them was also fourteen-year-old Jindřiška Nováková who hid Jan Kubiš´s bike. The witness spent the end of World War II and the liberation by Red Army in the cottage in Ledeč nad Sázavou, a little later he joined the Scout organization. He was its member until its ban by communists. After training as a carpenter, he served as a dog handler in the Border Guard in South Bohemia until 1959. After he was not allowed to work on an overseas ship because of his Catholic belief, he got married in 1962 and graduated from an evening secondary school. He took part in protests against the occupation in August 1968 and he took photos during them. He worked as a construction manager in the Construction of Roads and Railways company until the Velvet Revolution and he refused to sign an agreement with the entrance of occupation troops there. He returned to scouting after 1989 and he attended meetings that took place in Jaroslav Foglar´s legendary Sunny Bay. He was still living in Prague in 2021.