“I told him: ‘Comrade colonel, these things are untruths. I kept a good track. The political department worked here in the regiment, and if there were any little things, we dealt with them.’ So he told me after an argument that lasted two or three hours: “Appeal to the First Secretary Husák. You are a commander of the Regiment in the nomenklatura and you have the right to appeal to the First Secretary Husák.‘ We waited for two, three, four months and finally an order from the Minister arrived: ‘The one who had not been screened has to be transferred to the reverse.‘ I had not been screened and had to be transferred to the reverse.”
“We always ran to the fields when we suddenly heard a signal. My sister and worker Niklas were running to our house, she was in the garden, and he pushed her into the ditch. And when the bombs fell, shrapnel as big as a male palm fell a metre from her head. The station worker pushed her into a slightly wet shallower ditch to hide. And it turned out well, she was not hurt.”
"I woke up to the roar of the planes and then the phone rang from the command post and the shift commander reported to me: ‘The Republic has been invaded, the Warsaw Pact planes are landing in Ruzyně (airport). Come to headquarters where you will be told the order which was issued by president Svoboda concerning the difficult situation in the Republic.‘ There I found out that we were not to fight, we were to keep calm and remain level-headed so that there were no provocations.”
Josef Macek was born on 16 October 1932 in Bylnice in the Uherský Brod district. He successfully graduated from the Aviation School in Prostějov in 1951. In the Czechoslovak People´s Army air force, he served at the airports in Brno, Přerov and Svítkov, Pardubice. He retrained several times to fly various types of MIG aircraft. From 1960 he studied at Antonín Zápotocký Military Academy in Brno, and he graduated from it in 1963. This was followed by his rise in the military hierarchy. In 1961 he was promoted to major and five years later to lieutenant colonel. In 1964, he was transferred to the 11th Fighter Aviation Regiment in Žatec as deputy commander and two years later became its commander. In Žatec, he experienced the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops. He then did not pass the cadre screening and he was discharged from the army in 1971. As he says, in his case it was not because of any political activities or because of disagreement with the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops but because of a high-ranking officer‘s interest in his position in the army. After the screenings, Josef Macek was also expelled from the Communist Party. Although he had a cadre blot on his reputation, he had no problems finding a civilian job. First he got the position of chief engineer and then deputy director of the Technical Services in Luhačovice and moved to this spa town with his family. In Luhačovice he joined the Communist Party again. In 1990 he was rehabilitated and promoted to a reverse colonel. He lived in Luhačovice at the time of recording in 2021. He died on January 6, 2023.
