“At first, it looked like they would suppress it. Then, it suddenly collapsed and I cannot figure out the exact cause. You see, they still held all the power and used it, they would beat on boys and girls and just act like pigs, and then they suddenly collapsed. I found out when I was at a party at the Vyšehrad canonry. Going there, I passed by the Congress Centre. There were coaches parked from all over the country, all the way to eastern Slovakia, and lights were on in the centre. I gathered the communists were inside, discussing what to do next. When I was walking by on my way back, the vehicles were no longer there. Later on, I learned the coaches left because the centre’s cleaning ladies just kicked them out. From that, I derived that the end of communism had arrived. The cleaning ladies told them: ‘It’s 10 pm, so get out!’ They did.”
“We all listened to the radio. Dad and mum listened to London every night. I knew they were listening to something different from what was on the radio normally during the day. My sister way younger; we used to sleep in the children’s room. The door was half open, so that if my little sister whimpered, mum or dad heard her and knew they should have a look. They listened to the evening programme; it took an hour. They had to listen carefully, so nobody else could hear it. They wrapped the radio in a blanket and got under the blanket. But my hearing was very good, so I could hear it. It really caught my attention because it was in Czech and said things that were not on the radio in daytime. When mum was cooking lunch, I would get under the table and play with pots. I hit them rhythmically. All of a sudden, I said: ‘Boom boom boom boom. You are listening to the evening programme of the British Radio in Czech.’ Mum was scared. She didn’t know I knew how to read. She was a teacher. She had this principle that children should not be taught before going to school because otherwise they would be bored and thus naughty in school. It really angered me. I wanted to read, and when I found out about letters, it was very important to me. I learned this way: There is something special about Brno, in that every single house number includes the street name. No other city or town has that. So, I learned what they allowed me to – the address I lived at: Venhudova 17 – in case I got lost. I got the clue that the letters were phonetical, so that’s how I learned them. Then, I was so cunning that when we walked various streets on Sunday afternoons, I would ask for the streets’ names and look at the plates to see how it’s written. I knew how to read in about six weeks. Lidové noviny used to publish a two-page spread for children on Sundays. When I was nice, dad would read it for me. When I was not, it was over. I had to work around this. So, I learned to read. I kept it to myself until that day when I said the sentence to mum: ‘You are listening to…’ Mum told me: ‘Don’t ever say that to anyone, Jiří.’ I said: ‘I know. The plate on the radio says: »Remember that listening to foreign radio is punished by imprisonment or death«, so I know I’m not supposed to say that.’ After that, my parents allowed me to get under the blanket with them and listen to London along with them.”
“The Germans were mainly after dad; he wore the Czechoslovak customs service uniform, which looked a lot like the military uniform. His uniform just drove them crazy. That’s why we were forced to flee – they would really kill us eventually. They fired shots at dad.”
Jiří Grygar was born on 15 February 1936 at a customs office in Heinersdorf, Germany (Dziewiętlice, Poland today) to Josef Grygar and Hedvika, née Stojanová. The situation in the borderland was so tense in the late 1930s that the father had to leave his job and flee to Opava along with the family. He got a job as a customs officer there. When the Nazis took over the borderland in 1938, the family fled again, this time to Ostrava where the father was appointed the head officer of a train station. Jiří Grygar’s sister was born in early 1939. In March 1939, Jiří Grygar witnessed the Nazi invasion one day ahead – on 14 March. During the war, the family relocated again due to the father’s job; this time to Brno where Jiří Grygar witnessed bombing, the liberation, and the deportations of Germans. After the war, the father was reassigned to Opava again. The town was so devastated by bombing that the rest of the family did not arrive until September 1945. Jiří Grygar showed inclinations towards his future vocation from age eight. Having completed grammar school, he went on to study mathematics and physics at the Masaryk University in Brno and then astronomy in Prague. Having graduated, he got a job at Czechoslovakia’s largest observatory in Ondřejov. He got married in 1963 and his wife and he brought up three children over time. He left for a one-year stay in Canada in 1968, effectively avoiding the normalisation period tests. Under political pressure from the observatory’s leadership, he changed jobs and went to work at the low temperature physics department of the nuclear institute in Řež. He has been working at the Institute of Physics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences since 1980 (known as Czech Academy of Sciences since 1993). He never joined the communist party. He took part in several protests in 1989. He was one of the founding members of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic in 1994. He is a member of the Czech Sceptics Club. He is one of the best-known science popularisers. He was living in Prague at the time of recording in 2023.
