Milan Jaroš

* 1951

  • "One of the soldiers was playing with the trigger of his machine gun and a burst came out and hit the cobblestones. The stone fragments sprinkled my right leg. And the shooting started because the soldiers were scared and started shooting. And we ran into that alleyway in Dr. Vacek´s Square. And we ran into that little alley, around Klementinum, which goes to that pub, the Štika. I had been wearing slippers, I must have lost them. You could see the bullets digging into the wall, whistling around your ears. We ran into the street, five of us. It was an open V shape, the street, and now it started whistling both ways. The Russians started firing at each other. That was very dangerous. I was the last one to arrive and I found that I had a window behind me. So I smacked it with my hand, broke it and climbed into the room and the others behind me. Then there was a ceasefire, because the Russians found out they had been shooting against their own. And we went out into the yard."

  • "So [my aunt] told me that there is a small park next to the Children's House and in it comrades meet with students, with people, that there are public forums, comrades answering various questions. And that maybe I should go there. I didn't hesitate and I went there in the evening and I stayed there until midnight. There were taxi drivers standing there. And an announcement came that there was going to be latest, some extraordinary news. The radio announced it. And then we heard that we were being occupied by the Warsaw Pact troops and that somehow we were not supposed to resist and so on. This was around midnight, so the taxi drivers said, 'You know what, get in the car and let's find out what's going on.' Two taxi drivers said, 'We'll give you a ride, normally for free.' One had a Volga, the other had a dark, black [Tatra] 603, and we went to the radio station. At the radio station we didn't learn anything. So we [said we would] go to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. We met Smrkovský there, and he said, 'What can we do?' He was just helpless, you could see it in him. Then there was Císař, I think, who said, 'I'm going to sleep. Because what can we do? We can´t do anything.‘ We were saying, they're all helpless here, so we were talking, especially the older ones, I was still a young boy, that we would wake up Prague. And at five o'clock the march against the occupation will start."

  • "When I was a kid, when I was about ten years old or older, after the year 1960, I learned from various farmers, from my dad, from my friend's grandparents, how it was in the village when collectivization happened, when they confiscated property. Cows, machinery, sometimes bigger stables or even bigger farms. They took them, they drove the farmers away, and that's how they were telling me the story. The men were furious, some were drinking, and the women were crying on the doorstep. Because they couldn't do anything. How do you defend yourself against such violence?"

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Eye Direct, 14.03.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:53:14
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

If we are afraid, we will be afraid all our lives. One day we should end it

Milan Jaroš in the Eye Direct studio, 14 March 2022
Milan Jaroš in the Eye Direct studio, 14 March 2022
zdroj: Eye Direct

Milan Jaroš was born on 24 December 1951 in Nové Město na Moravě. The communist coup in 1948 and the subsequent collectivization deprived his family of their house with its workshops and sawmill. His father, Václav Jaroš, was imprisoned for six months after the confiscation of the house because in anger he destroyed a photograph of Klement Gottwald in a pub. At the age of sixteen, Milan experienced first-hand the invasion of Prague by Warsaw Pact troops when he was staying there with his aunt on holiday. He co-organised the first protest event called for 21 August 1968 at five o‘clock in the morning. He distributed leaflets, discussed with the occupiers and on 24 August he was shot by one of the soldiers, fortunately he escaped with a scratch on his arm. In 1971 he trained as a radio-television repairman and continued to work in Žďár nad Sázavou. During the normalisation years he used to play basketball for ŽĎAS Žďár nad Sázavou team, which played in the second league. In November 1989, he participated in demonstrations in Nové Město na Moravě and showed footage of the Prague demonstrations in the local culture centre. In the 1990s he started a business and the family farm was returned to him and his sisters. In 2022, he was living near Golčov Jeníkov.