"I never wrote poetry until I was here in Australia. I was writing letters to my mother and it was getting on my nerves. I wrote over and over again, for example, that it was going to be a north wind, that it was going to be forty degrees again, because when the north wind blows here it's always hot. I also knew that State Security was opening her letters, so I thought I would write her poems. I don't know why I thought of that. At the time, I got my hands on a book by Ezra Pound with a foreword by T. S. Eliot, in which he says, 'If you want to write poems, you have to see if you're up to it. You've got to write it day and night, and see if it takes.' I was taking a forty-minute train ride to and from the city at the time, working in downtown Melbourne. I'd get a notebook and I'd write in it on the way, what I thought, what I saw and so on. And in three years I wrote about five hundred poems."
"A few days before, Austrian airlines trained the pilots at Bratislava airport, so they landed and took off there. When we heard the planes, we thought they were training again, but the Russians were already landing there. We had a garden in a gardening colony and I was still there on the 20th (the correct number is the 21st). Russian helicopters were already flying there. I saw Russian tanks coming through the window. People were tearing down signs with street names on them and writing on the ground in Russian, 'Go home,' and so I left. I had my ticket, I had everything sorted out. I had also arranged for my wife and children to get an Austrian transit visa so that they could come to me as soon as possible. My wife didn't have a German visa. I left for Karlsruhe via Vienna on 1 September. I got to Karlsruhe and immediately wanted to telephone my wife, but at that time there was a half-day wait for a connection. I guess everybody was on the phone. When I got through to her, I told her not to wait for her German visa and to take the first train to Vienna. I said, 'Call me from Vienna. Stay at the first hotel and I'll take care of you. We'll sort out the German visa in Austria.' When she told me when she was coming to Vienna, a colleague from the institute told me at eight o'clock in the evening that he would come by car at three o'clock in the morning and that we would go to Vienna to pick them up. I will never forget that. He had a little Volkswagen. We drove all night. We arrived in Vienna at the station and the train was, fortunately, late. And I'll never forget that either. The train comes to the station, I see my son in the window and he shouts, 'Daddy's here! Daddy is here.'"
"I took advantage of the fact that I was studying in Prague, but my permanent residence was in Chocen. So I was in Prague for the elections about twice, but I was not in Chocen even once. I always used the excuse that I was in Prague. And sometimes I didn't go to Prague at all, but twice I was there and I managed to cast an invalid white ballot. And it wasn't a tarp, it was just symbolically tucked against the wall, so you couldn't go behind the tarp. Yet somehow I managed to throw the white ticket in. So I never once threw a single ticket in there. Because there was only a single ticket, and then you could throw in the white invalid ticket, or you could get the ticket and crumple it or break it to make it invalid. I know that once in Chocen, when I had sort of called off in Prague, a 'sixty-three' came to my brother's house. He hadn't voted yet and the constituencies were competing to see who could recall a single candidate one hundred percent first. So they came for him and took him to the polling station. It was a puppetry. There's no way to put it."
"I had a friend I knew from athletics, his name was Milan Středa. He studied philosophy in Prague and then had a job in the archives in Dobruška as an archivist. I visited him a few times. And he decided to flee Czechoslovakia, via Hungary to Yugoslavia. I was already in Bratislava. And suddenly he came to me in Bratislava with his wife and a small child, saying that they would run away together. They spent the night with us and left. And they caught them. They investigated and found out that they slept over. So one day, two State Security officers showed up at my place. They investigated me, and I had to go to Hradec Kralove to the court where I had to testify. I was worried that they would arrest me too. If this had happened in the fifties, I would have been arrested for sure. They didn't convict me, but the State Security officers immediately took advantage of this and called me to State Security in Bratislava. So I went there. And I started telling them my fairy tales, that when foreign guests came, I would show them around, because I knew the languages, but I would report to them. He shouted at me that when he talks about cooperation, he means active cooperation. I mean that we will meet regularly, I will be given tasks to do and I will report back to them. I said to him, 'I can't do that, because if I signed for you I would have to shoot or kill myself the next day. Because I come from a Catholic family and I know what can and cannot be done. And I certainly couldn't do this.' And they let me go."
"Jiří Mráz, my best friend, got sixteen years of Jáchymov when he was nineteen years old. He went to high school in Litomyšl. A Benedictine monk was teaching there, I think Latin and Czech, and they needed to arrest him. The schoolmaster, who was a State Security cop, found pictures of Lenin and Gottwald in the clogged toilet. I don't know if the boys actually tore it down and clogged it, but it's possible that he clogged it and reported it to State Security. And there was a big trial. They picked him up in sweatpants from the gym in Chocen. There was an investigation and it's interesting that about six months later they let him go home. He was at home, it was during the holidays. We were still doing the Sázava from Velky Darko to Český Šternberk, the two of us together in tents. And we came back home, and about a week later I went to get some bread and I stopped by his place. I ring the bell at the house, the window opens and his mother appears, waving desperately for me to go away. I was very lucky, because there were already State Security cops arresting him, investigating him, ransacking the house. They took him away and then there was a trial. The trial took place in Litomyšl. The provocateurs in the class in Vysoké Mýto, two communist students, asked me why I didn't go there. They agitated for the students to go there. I absolutely refused."
"My dad was already working at the post office for several years when I was born. I was born in 1933, he graduated in 1932. He worked at the station post office in Česká Třebová. And I had a little whistle or a trumpet that I used to use to go there to see him. In the morning, when my dad was already on duty, I would eat and go to the post office. It was a short walk. I honked the horn under the window and dad came for me. I still remember how the post office worked, how the telephone was connected, of which there weren't many yet. There was a woman sitting there and she had to connect the numbers. And the telegram? It was like in the old movies. It was spinning and tapping out commas and dots. Dad would read it and write the words, which he would stick on and it would be delivered to the recipient. And if someone wanted to send a telegram, dad would punch it out in Morse code. I remember that."
Josef Tomáš was born on 23 November 1933 in the family of a postal clerk in Polička. He grew up in Česká Třebová, where he lived through the German occupation from 1939 to 1945. After the war he moved with his parents to Chocen. He graduated from the grammar school in nearby Vysoké Mýto. His close friend from the Scouts, Jiří Mráz, was one of the victims of the political trials in the 1950s. In the monster trial of Stříteský and Co. he was sentenced to sixteen years for alleged treason. Josef Tomáš graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University in Prague. After his studies, he lived in Liberec. He taught at the industrial school there and worked as an assistant at the university. He married and had two children. From 1962 he worked as a scientist at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. In 1968 he went to West Germany on a scholarship and never returned to socialist Czechoslovakia. His family emigrated with him. From 1971 to 1976 he worked at the Volkswagen research centre in Wolfsburg. In 1976 he moved to Melbourne, Australia, where he taught at a technical university. In Australia he began writing poems and publishing collections of poetry. He also worked on translations of Czech poets into English. In 2021 he was living in Melbourne.
Josef Tomáš (right) with his friend Jiří Mráz, who was sentenced in 1950 in the Stříteský and Co. monster trial to 16 years in prison / released after about 5 years on amnesty / Josef Tomáš's graduation / Prague / 1957
Josef Tomáš (right) with his friend Jiří Mráz, who was sentenced in 1950 in the Stříteský and Co. monster trial to 16 years in prison / released after about 5 years on amnesty / Josef Tomáš's graduation / Prague / 1957
