Leoš Válka

* 1953

  • "I got off the pipe with a friend and took a taxi to Vienna. It was August, we were walking along Kärntner Strasse towards Stephansplatz. All around crowded cafes, sidewalks overflowed and it was warm. We decided to sit down, have a coffee and enjoy the West. Everything was occupied, but there were some people sitting at one table and they had two free seats. I asked them if I could sit with them and they said yes. We were talking in Czech and they spoke English. Finally, we got talking. To this day, I don't know how we were able to talk. Our English was poor and desperate. We told him that we were emigrants and were going to Australia to start a company. The middle-aged man was looking at me, and later it turned out that he was the representative of the highest ranking person in the Australian embassy. If I were in his shoes today, I wouldn't react at all. That Vienna was full of spies and provocateurs back then. He gave me a piece of paper, wrote a phone number on it and told me to call him when we would get there. We then sat there for a while and finally came back. When they let us go, I immediately called him. That person really worked there and helped us.”

  • "New and new refugees were joining our quarantine every day. They were all possible nationalities. Among them also Czechs and Slovaks. Some of them told us that they came by a route that someone had advised them through Bulgaria. It was said that there was a border guard who let people in on certain days and hours at some minor crossing just like that, out of love for them. I called them and had an exact description of the village, route, hours and everything else. I dictated it to them, and they believed me so much that they jumped into the Zhiguli. He raised the barrier for them, and they did pass through. We met in Traiskirchen, where we were just painting the roof of the church and hanging on the ropes. They were coming and it was clear to them that it was us."

  • “Later, I went down that pipe quite a lot because it was a way of getting letters out to people who got away and wanted to let their people know they'd made it. We wore jackets full of letters. The whole building was guarded, patrols with rifles walked around. I once stood on the last sprinkler that holds the drip pipe. We kept the window open in the upper toilet. I was three meters above the ground, standing on the last sprinkler, and a soldier came out and stood underneath me. I was about a meter above his head and my foot was well placed. He suddenly stopped and began to roll his cigar. I thought to myself: He must feel me! I don't think he would shoot me, but it would be a problem. When someone escapes from the camp, it makes life quite complicated. However, he normally lit up and smoked. I said to myself again: I'm in an Indian movie, that's probably not true! After a while he finished smoking and walked away around the corner. I immediately got down and the other boy got down after me. When we were coming back, someone closed the window in the toilet. We climbed up the pipe and couldn't get to the building. The other one took off his shoe and began to break in. He didn't succeed at all because he was afraid to cut into it. In the end he kicked it out and we jumped in."

  • "We had an acquaintance in Vienna and he had a Czech passport. He himself had Austrian parents, so he had an exception. There was a special status of a person who could travel legally and had a special permit to do so. This was evidenced by a stamp on the entire page of the passport, which was about twelve by six centimeters big and was in three languages. If you had this crazy complicated stamp, but there were no state symbols in it, they would normally let you go at the border. So, once he lent us his passport, I looked at it and picked out all the words I needed and built them into other stamps. For example, I ordered a stamp for the entrance to the building for employees, which contained part of the words I needed. I then used a razor blade to cut out the words that were necessary for mine from the stamps they made for me. The biggest problem was the Cyrillic alphabet, because they didn't have it here. They just didn't do it, so I had to make some letters individually, for example from O or accents. I glued it together and then sent a person in a car with a stamp and a hair dryer to a hotel in Bulgaria. There he met the girl I needed to bring. He used the stamp at the hotel, dried it with a hair dryer and brought her here."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 04.12.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 01:59:34
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 2

    Praha, 04.02.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 02:00:40
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

In the end, I came to the conclusion that it would be easier to start my own business outside

Current photo of Leoš Válka taken during the filming in a Prague studio on December 4, 2020
Current photo of Leoš Válka taken during the filming in a Prague studio on December 4, 2020
zdroj: ED studio, Prague

Leoš Válka was born on October 30, 1953 in Prague. His childhood was significantly marked by his father‘s chronic asthma, depressed family atmosphere, but also by tuberculosis, as a result of which he had to spend part of his sixth year of life in a hospital. After problems at the ČSAD vocational school, at the end of which Leoš successfully sued the company for unjustified dismissal from the school, he began making a living as a stoker at the Náprstek museum or as a night security man. He worked as a mountaineer from the mid-seventies. Later, he founded the work at heights operation at the District Construction Company Prague. In August 1981, he and his colleagues managed to escape from a trip to Italy. The pre-planned event continued with a short stay in the Traiskirchen concentration camp, work at heights in the vicinity of Vienna and a subsequent departure to the dream Australia. A group of Czech emigrants arrived there in the summer of 1982, and as soon as possible, they started a business in their field of mountaineering. As part of this, they also managed to certify their own technology, which they then applied to a number of skyscrapers, as well as state buildings and universities in the country. However, Leoš, who ran the company, decided seven years after the Velvet Revolution to return to the Czech Republic, where he founded and for some time ran a branch of the Australian company. After the floods in 2002, he bought a broken-down factory in Holešovice, which he transformed into the DOX gallery. It was opened in 2008 and Leoš has been its director since then.