Ing. Zdeněk Bohuslav Hubáček

“We discussed all the issues related to Prague in that commission, which included problems of the Žižkov TV tower and its architecture. The tower was originally supposed to stand on the Petřín hill. But the Society for Old Prague revolted against it and managed to take the idea off the table. So, ironically, as one member of the committee described it – we’ve saved one beautiful view of the Petřín hill, but the Žižkov tower can now be seen from everywhere. Luckily, we managed to optimize the transmission antennas’ performance. We taught experts to listen to the concerns of citizens. And we taught citizens that they mustn’t always suspect the experts of trying to diddle them.”

Mr. Hubáček remained true to the Water Research Institute in Prague. He describes how work was done there. “Gradually, I moved from assisting to actually completing assignments on my own; thanks to that I managed to come up with several objects. I’ve already mentioned the rainwater relief and others – mostly it was safety spillways and dam drains that managed to stand even in an unexpected test. They were designed for a 100-year flood, which occurs approximately once every hundred years. But they were met with a 500-year flood, which only occurs once in five hundred years. As far as this goes, I consider myself a proud man, for I did not work in vain.”

“The procession received a message that an armored train was approaching the station which was about two kilometers from the city center. There was a truck in front of the city council, I was just about to get in it but then I was taken down for being too young. There were older people on board of the truck, armed with guns, rifles and one bazooka. They left to stop the armored train. But unfortunately, they weren’t level-headed, and the armored train eliminated them with a machine gun. So if I had gone with them, I wouldn’t be alive anymore. Only one man from the truck crew survived who, in all the fear and terror, had jumped into a culvert under the road. They had to dig him out afterwards, because he wasn’t able to get out of the pipe on his own. That’s just to show the scale of horror of the last hours of the war.”

“I will never forget the last days of the occupation when my father’s student, the promising sculptor Pepíček Král, came to visit us; he had been taken to Germany like most young people. Because the Germans had needed workers for their factories. Germany was bombed-out at that point, so he was walking home by foot. He stopped by our place and my dad tried to convince him to spend the night. He said he would walk the last twelve kilometers to Leskovice, that he knew some trail shortcuts. So our persuasion was futile and he left. And lo, a bunch of rebels from a near-by village disarmed a Wehrmacht unit. They guarded them poorly and one deserter returned to the SS garrison in Pelhřimov. The garrison then took off and slaughtered the population of Leskovice. Including Pepíček Králů, who had escaped all the dangers on the road, escaped bombing, only to come to Leskovice to find death. So, that was a profound experience.”