Jindřich Ťukal

"We managed to visit the trophy weapons. Self-propelled guns, anti-aircraft guns, smaller guns like that, the quads. It worked. We sat there and could turn, the gun barrels were up and down and the platform was rotating. The bombs were there, there were really big bombs on display and freely accessible. I don't know if anyone watched it. There was a statue on Horní náměstí, it was talked about a lot and still it is. It was the knight Rüdiger. He then moved to Jablonec, Germany. Beneath it, there were canals and shafts. The bigger boys climbed on, us - the smaller ones were let to the edge. Besides the fountain there was a passage down to the underground.'

"At the end of the war, at the beginning of May, I guess May 6 or 7, the Germans were on the run, they wanted to leave damage behind. They were flying over Jablonec and the Russians were shooting at them from fighter jets. I heard the thunder. I was at my grandmother's. At that time, she lived near the church on Horní náměstí. It was good to see our church from the window. I stood by the window and watched. I saw one plane, another plane. Something fell out of that one plane. It was a bomb. As it dropped, it got lost in some misty haze. Then came a tremendous blow. That was 200 meters from that apartment. Grandma pushed me away from the window. I had to move to some safe place. The next day it was explained, the chase of the two planes. They wanted to hit the church on Horní náměstí, but they didn't. They hit it 50 m from the church in such a house and it was taken away completely. Earlier, they dropped two bombs at the bus station. Apparently, they wanted to hit that church of Dr. Farsky, which is a little above that. There, the next day, my dad took me to that place and I saw the crater from the bombs."

“The February (coup d’état – ed,’s note) actually did affect me because of the Scouting. I was a Boy Scout and the Boy Scout organization was about to be disbanded. Míla Jíra, the leader of all Pioneers (state-approved organization for children – transl.’s note) then began visiting all schools and classrooms in Jablonec. He was persuading the children… sitting down next to them. He had it arranged with the teachers to come during the lessons. A pupil would always surrender his seat to him and Míla would sit down next to the other pupil and talk him into it, listing the arguments why Pioneer was a good organization, and all that... Then he would move on to another pupil and sit next to all of them one by one and keep talking. I remember that when it was my turn and he started explaining about Pioneers, I began objecting: ‘No, no, I am a Boy Scout, and I will not join the Pioneers, I cannot.’ ‘But the Boy Scouts are to be disbanded!’ I replied: ‘Well, yes, but not for the moment. No, I am a Boy Scout and that’s it!’ That was in 1948-49-50, the period when Boy Scouts were forced to end their activity and children were made to become Pioneers or join the Youth Union for the older ones. Some children let themselves to be talked into it, some not so much, and some not at all. But I have never forgiven them the Scouting. When the political thaw later occurred in 1967 and Foglar’s books began to be published again, and the mechanical puzzles like the ‘hedgehog in the cage’ and all this appeared... I was totally enthusiastic about it like a little kid: ‘Wow, the hedgehog in the cage, and Foglar and all this…’”

“The Comecon, or Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Well, I have never heard anyone sing praises about it, not even in retrospect. I can tell you one example for all: there was a company called Nářadí Vrchlabí, which produced hydraulic tools and hydraulic power units, among others. One specific type of a hydraulic unit was called IHA3. When you ordered it from Vrchlabí, they were able to get it ready for delivery within three weeks. It cost, I don’t know, perhaps 12 000 Crowns, it simply had a certain price. In three weeks, a high-quality and perfect product was delivered and it was capable of functioning for 10 or 14 years without any maintenance. They simply knew how to do their stuff in Vrchlabí. The Comecon then deemed it necessary to give some jobs to Bulgarians and to develop machinery production there, not just agriculture, which they were good at and which they knew well, whereas in the machinery industry they were lagging behind, to put it mildly, and they eventually moved the production to Bulgaria, which was another Comecon country. When it became necessary to purchase the device again, it was ordered from Bulgaria. But it was not delivered in three weeks, but after one year. It was a lot more expensive and it was very defective and it didn’t work. That was the outcome of the Comecon. There is no need to say more.”

“Later I learnt about it and we went there with my dad to see it. I don’t remember if it was on the same day or the day after. They bombed various places in Jablonec and they wanted to target the Jablonec skyscrapers, as they were called. There are high rise buildings close to the bus terminal in the direction of Podhorská Street, and they were nicknamed Jablonec skyscrapers, because they were the highest buildings on this side of the entire Jablonec district. There were no higher buildings at that time. No prefabricated panel buildings were being built at that time. One bomb dropped in the middle of the bus terminal and it made a hole. I remember that I stood next to it with my dad and it had a diameter of about three to four metres and it was about 1,5 metres deep, if I tried to describe it by precise numbers. At least it seemed to me to be about this size. If I had fallen down there as a little child that I was, I could have stood up at the bottom and there would have been still some space left above my head. I don’t know, perhaps it was not 1,5 metres, but 1,2 metres. It was not a large crater all the way to the bottom, but at the same time it was not a small hole that you use for playing marbles, either. It was something in between. It was in the middle of the present-day bus terminal, nearly exactly in the centre of it. And there was another hole, caused by a bomb which hit the beginning of the skyscraper zone. It hit the very edge of the building, and the blast ripped one of the walls all the way from the top to the bottom. And we – and everybody else who walked by – could see right inside all those rooms. The whole building was open, from the attic to the basement, and you could see a living room there, and something else over there, chairs, tables, and everything else was visible from the top to the bottom.”