Luděk Štipl

* 1949

  • "'Dear Mum, so we finally managed to get to Canada.' I described the flight, how we saw the cargo ships on sea, small as match boxes and how we landed. How nice the weather was in Toronto. And that Josef was waiting for us, that we are all fine and that we are sending many thanks. I glued the post stamps with my own spit because I knew that from saliva, they can get the information about blood group and they knew mine, I was a blood donor and such. I wrote the date ten days ahead, sent it in an envelope to Josef and he took it to the post office on the same day as the date on the postcard. Now we were left in peace and nobody bothered us any more."

  • "We tried to suppoert them from afar. We bought Czech books from Škvorecký and the like. We tried to send some books to Czechoslovakia. Those books which would be certainly seized, we had them rebound with different title and everything so that it would not be found out. When here [in Czechoslovakia] something wrong was happening, we wrote letters to our Members of Parliament. We wrote to the Minister of Foreign Affairs Joe Clark, or to Walter McLean, he was our MP, so that they send, urge, so that they are on their [of the Czechoslovaks'] side when they meet Czechoslovak polititians. We congratulated Ronald Reagan on his birthday. We reassured him that he's treating the other side right. We did our best to contribute and we were glad that it was moving somewhere."

  • And then one sat on the train in the direction of Břeclav and thought to oneself, maybe just in half an hour, we will be there. Or we won’t be. They could find some pretext. It was nerve-wracking. I was not that daring to say a good-bye with a banner because the last time, my attempt didn’t work out. I tried to be sort of humble. The problem was when the conductor came, not far from the border. She looked at our ticket and she said: ‘Oh, lucky you. You’re going to Italy with all your family!’ And only in that moment the children learned that we are going to Italy. We were going to see our aunt in Brno.’ Those bewildered eyes… ‘And why are we not going to visit the aunt? Why are we going there?’ - ‘Please, now don’t ask me about anything, we’ll explain later, look at the scenery and be quiet.’ Then the searches came, border guard with submachine guns, a German Shepherd crawling under the cars to search in case there was something. The stress that we’re only a few metres away from there. And finally, the train set to motion and we were in Austria. It was a marvelous sight, those neat villages and fields. Tears ran down our faces, after five years of stress, effort and all that money spent, we managed to do it and we were happy.”

  • “Dad used to tell us about that all since we had been children. We exactly knew what concentration camps and gulags were, how did the [Russian] revolution go, the legionnaries’ stories from Russia. There at the isolated lodge where we lived, I had nobody to tell it to but when I was in Mohelnice, maybe I wanted to brag or maybe I just liked telling stories, in the second, third and fourth grade, I confided about it, I explained to my classmates how it really happened, that the teacher is not right. Later on, I learned about snitches and I knew that there were farmers in Mohelnice who, I think, didn’t want to join the agricultural coop (Šrámek, Kuba and the like), and I became terrified that maybe someone whom I told it can tell at home. And I didn’t know the parents. Maybe they’re snitches, too, or some helpers of theirs, and I became really scared that someone would come to our house and dad will go to jail. Back then, one could get ten or fifteen years in jail just for talking too much. So, I kept observing those people – nope, this one smiled at me and his mom met me and gave me some change to buy ice cream so they cannot be snitches. I lived in this fear for several years, nobody snitched on us but then, one becomes scared of trivialities and I couldn’t confide about this and I was really scared then.”

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    Olomouc, 22.06.2020

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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I checked the mailbox and there was a postcard from Yugoslavia

Luděk Štipl. 1978
Luděk Štipl. 1978
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Luděk Štípl was born on the 10th February of 1949 in Šumperk and he spent his first seven years of life in a forest keeper lodge at Střítež where his father worked as the forest keeper for the town council of Mohelnice. In this time he calls pre-television and in a house without electricity, he kept hearing stories of the forest workers, of which some had been in the Czechoslovak legions in Russia during the WWII, as well as the WWII stories of his father who had been a Communist resistance fighter. As the forests owned by the Mohelnice town were nationalised in the 1950’s, the family had to move. From the second grade on, Luděk attended school in Mohelnice where the family lived in a house near a park which was under maintenance of his father. Luděk would have liked to go to a forestry school, parents decided otherwise and in the somewhat freer atmosphere of the second half of the 1960, Luděk went to a Secondary Technical School of Electrical Engineering. With his friend Josef Vrána, they planned that after graduation, they would travel the world but the 1968 occupation changed their plan. The witness got married, soon, his son was born and there was no chance of travelling in Europe. His friend remained single and in 1968, he indeed emigrated and put down his roots in Toronto, Canada. During the 1970’s normalisation, Luděk, his wife and their children tried to leave Czechoslovakia several times but they did not manage. Only in 1979, under the pretext of a scholarship in Italy, they travelled to Austria where they stayed as political refugees. After some ups and downs, they managed to get Canadian visa. They settled close to Toronto and with Josef’s help, they lived in the Ontario province for many years. They spent some time in Quebec and British Columbia as well. Back in Czechoslovakia, Luděk had trained as an art conservator and in America, he worked in this field. He found a job in an art gallery and then in a museum. At that time, he first encountered living Jewish culture. This had considerable influence on his creative activities when he returned to Czech Republic after 2000. He had previous experience as a lecturer from Canadian universities which he could use; he helped renewing the synagogue in Lostice and presenting the local Jewish culture to wider public. He was a co-founder of the Respect and Tolerance association whose aim is to care for the Jewish heritage of Loštice, Mohelnice and Úsov, both material and immaterial. As a member of the association, he cooperates on planning the exhibits and documenting witnesses‘ memories. In 2020, he lived in Radnice in the Pavlov settlement.