Ing. Jiří Hold

“It was in 1967, that ´summer of mercy´ in our country. With Branislav and director Tomsa, Vašek, Milan… and a cameraman we went to Russia to shoot a documentary about the Russian October Revolution. At first we were shooting in Moscow, then in Kiev, or vice versa, and things were not going well in Moscow. There were many paradoxical situations. Nothing much interesting n Moscow, we were shooting in an institute for Marxism and Leninism, each of us received a book there, I still have it, the signature of the institute’s director. We finished there and then we travelled to Leningrad to make some shots from the Aurora ship. There was one member of our team, Kincl, but not the one who had been in London, another person with the same name. And the local staff told us: ´Wait, that commissar from Aurora, who had been firing, is still alive, his name is Čeckovský.´ They really fetched the man, an old man in a leather coat. At first we took him to a screening room and showed him John Reed’s film Ten Days That Shook the World, with the scene where they are attacking the Winter Palace (meaning the propaganda film by director Eisenstein from 1927, not the reportage book of the same name by John Reed – ed.’s note). We set up the lights, camera and sound equipment, Čeckovský sat down, we chatted a bit before, one or two shots of vodka… We intended to start the film, then director Tomsa would stop it and light up the lamps and start up the camera. We began playing the well-known scene, where the soldiers are climbing over the gates of the Winter Palace and taking the building. He looked at it, stopped the film and remarked: ´ Eto fantazia rezhisera.´ It was just the director’s imagination, it didn’t happen this way at all.´ - ´Fine, so what really happened?´ All of us who had seen those Russian films knew it. But eventually it became clear that the scene had been actually filmed from the other side of the square, not at the place where they climbed over the gate. He said: ´It didn’t happen like this. They entered, the provisional government was sitting there and we told them: comrades, there is a revolution – and they got up and went home.´ Whereas the official sources claimed that they arrested them, took them to the Peter and Paul Fortress, but this man said that this was not the truth. He also remembered that there was a women’s battalion, composed exclusively of women: ´We came there, each of us took a rifle, kicked their asses, and sent them home.´”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the film called ´Aiding the Chief Prosecutorship,´ which dealt with the death of Jan Masaryk, it was directed by Jaromír Vašta (actually by Vlastimil Vávra – ed’s note). It caused troubles for us, because we created a counterrevolutionary film, the cameraman was Fojtík, director or screenwriter was Škutina, and it showed the real circumstances of Masaryk’s death. Somebody had written an article for the Špígl magazine about Jan Masaryk’s death, the author’s name was Veno Vajgl, and we went to London to see him. We collaborated with doctor Sum, who had been Masaryk’s secretary and a scout from the central council, by the way, (resistance fighter and political prisoner Antonín Sum, ed.’s note). We went to visit this doctor Smutný, who lived in Glasgow and who had been the second secretary. Veno Vajgl and I recorded the interview, he had written this article for Špígl even before the occupation, claiming that it was not clear what had really happened with Masaryk and that he had probably been murdered. Then we interviewed Smutný. After we were finished we returned to London and were about to fly home. But the British Airways went on strike at that time. We were not able to get home, and had to find another way. We returned from the airport, and we had a message that somebody was waiting at us. A gentleman named Filip Whitehead came in, he was from the BBC, and perhaps he was also an English intelligence officer, and he informed us that somebody would probably come to see us. No, wait, at first we returned from Glasgow and a person from the Russian embassy came to visit us in our guesthouse – well, I’m not sure if I should actually talk about it. We were a team of three, Vašta, a cameraman and me, and the Russian employee offered air tickets to us. They asked us to go to Russia, offering us tickets, and promising that they would prove that they had not been involved in Jan Masaryk’s death. We told them we would think it over and after they left, we decided not to take the tickets. Within half an hour other two gentlemen showed up, saying they were from the BBC, this Whitehead, I still remember his name, who told us: ´Look, you just had a visitor and they are inviting you to go to Moscow and finish your film. We recommend that you do not go, because the plane might crash or you might be run over by a car, or something like that.´ I still remember my shock as we were sitting there. I said. ´Christ, I’m no James Bond, I want to go home, I got nothing to do with that.´ Things got serious…”

“We arrived to Krasnodar, and we were to leave by plane from Krasnodar, but when I sat on my seat in the airplane, it fell over with me, and an engineer came and fixed it with a piece of wire – I have all these flying stories – and we taxied to the runway and suddenly the plane bounced and a wheel came off. It was in October, but it was terribly hot, and we could see the wheel rolling along the airplane, the plane came one-side down and the wheel was just lying next to it. It was so hot and they made us stay inside and they shut off the power units, it was unbearably hot, and eventually they arrived for us and told us we would wait for another airplane. But the way they were repairing it: about fifteen Russians standing around that broken wheel, smoking… and nothing happening. Meanwhile we were being roasted inside the airplane. And on the flight to Prague, they handed us some chicken as a meal, and we asked the stewardess for coffee, and she said: ´We’ve only got tea.´ As true Czechs we had brought ground coffee with us, and we gave it to her and said: ´We’ve got coffee here.´ - ´All right, we’ll prepare it for you.´ We were curious how they would prepare the coffee in an airplane, and Vašek Svoboda, the camera assistant, thus got up from his seat and pretended to go to the lavatory, and he peered into the galley… They had a regular stove with open fire, and they were boiling the water for coffee there, on board the plane! We returned to our seats, sat down and kept quiet. Tomsa, the director, asks us: ´Guys, what’s wrong, why are you so pale?´ - ´Nothing, we’re fine.´ Suddenly there was an announcement that we were actually not flying directly to Prague but that there would be a stopover in Berlin. We landed in Berlin, for refueling, but then they told us. ´The captain’s duty hours are over, the flight will not continue to Prague.´ We had loads of baggage and equipment, all these cameras and lights, the television was cutting costs and thus they had us bring all the equipment by ourselves. ´Just take a train instead from the Tempelhof station, the express train makes a one-minute stop in Tempelhof. We came to the station, the train arrived, one minute was gone and we haven’t even loaded half of our stuff. Brána and I were therefore standing by the emergency brake and we told the conductor: ´Sir, if the train starts moving, we pull the emergency brake.´ - ´You can’t do it.´ - ´But there’s no way, we only got a minute.´ They were East Germans, and they eventually allowed us to load it all, and we arrived to Prague the following morning, tired to death, by an express train from Tempelhof.”

“You could easily get crazy if you were to work with director Krejčík. Do you know these stories about director Krejčík beating actors or chasing them on the stairs, and so on? He was showing all this in the old Beseda. Recently we went on a boating trip with a group of colleagues from the television, guys who do boating and sailing, and we were sharing memories we had of him. The broadcasts from Beseda were done live, the program was not prerecorded, during the week it was rehearsed and then it was broadcast live. There was one famous actress, I can’t remember her name now, and Krejčík was directing the program. At that time, cameras used iconoscopes, or supericonoscopes, and awfully lot of light was needed, and lamps were thus blazing in the studio and it got very hot and we were rehearsing throughout the afternoon. There was a break between the final afternoon rehearsal and the evening live broadcast and this actress came and said that she couldn’t stand it, and asked us if it would be possible to take a shower somewhere. We replied: ´Sure, we’ll show you where the showers are, it’s upstairs, in the staff rooms, you can take a shower there.´ - ´Fine, boys, show me the way.´ We left the studio and told her, ´please, come with us, madam...,´ I forgot her name. But at that moment, Krejčík stormed out of the director’s room and asked: ´Lady, where are you going? You are to study your script.´ She said: ´Mr. director, I’m going to take a shower, just look at me, I look so tired after the final rehearsal.´ He told her: ´Madam, you will not go anywhere, and anyway, you are no madam at all, you are a cow.´”