Tomáš Vydra

* 1960

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  • "So I was working at Sparta at the time. Because Sparta wasn't just football or hockey, it was a huge organisation at that time, with a lot of sports, and I was the tennis coach there. Nowadays all those sports are separate, but back then it was one organization, the Sparta Sports Union. I worked there, and I actually unlocked the Sparta with other friends so that Václav Havel and a lot of the people around him could get in and go to the gallery from the inside. And actually inside we were still making coffee for them and they had a chance to sit down and talk, to talk about what to do and how to do it, because everything was in chaos, and it was great that they could sit somewhere for a while and get a little, a little idea. So I was very close to that, with these - this was on the 25th and 26th of November."

  • "My grandmother on my mother's side had an ear for music. I don't have that, but I have a musical sense, I just like listening to music. And actually in that Africa I suddenly started listening to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, because that's what those people had. Ghanaian music, which is called highlife, is extremely interesting, extremely lively, so it was swirling around. What was interesting was that I went to a local school where I was the only white person, so when the Ashanti King Osei Tutu II died, I was the only white person at the funeral of the Ashanti King because the whole school went there. There were bands that escorted the soul. Those Ashanti funerals were colorful. They had... orange was the color of mourning. The music that was played there - I love the energy. I love going to concerts by young bands. I don't really go to old band concerts, because if I want to see a tired old man, I look in the mirror. But I love the energy that the music gives off. I think that's a wonderful thing. That's where I started with music, I started collecting records. Collecting - that's a stupid term at ten or eleven, but I just had one or two or three records, I had some tapes, some cassettes, and that's what I brought back here. I got some in Holland. Well, this is where I found out there were exchanges. That there's an exchange market every Sunday. And I started going to the exchange market. Which was good, because from time to time the cops would come in, beat us all up, take everything from us, but there was always a market, exchange, every Sunday. It was a complete miracle that basically in the seventies there were illegal exchanges where people would exchange, buy, sell just records of western artists. Every time they broke it up somewhere, it moved somewhere else. There were no cell phones, there was no internet, there was nothing, and yet we all suddenly knew where to go."

  • "I don't really like movies that describe communism as if it was fun. It wasn't fun. And State Security was anything but a bunch of jerks. They knew very well what they were doing. They were just clinging to the fact that I wasn't yet fifteen, that under the international convention of children they couldn't interrogate me, and that I was actually free to move around. So when I knocked on the door of the cell, they let me out into the corridor. I couldn't go any further than the corridor because there were already other bars there, and there was a guard sitting there, and he wouldn't let me go anywhere. But I could go into the corridor. And I just watched my parents having a hard time, especially my mother, and it left me with this... I realized at that moment that in order to handle this crazy unfreedom, my soul had to become so free that actually my existence would be in sheer rebellion. And I began to provoke them. I found... I asked for a textbook, because I had textbooks there, because I had to take differential exams, because I was still in elementary school and I had to take differential exams to finish that particular class. So I asked for a Russian textbook and I was learning Russian in that hallway. I thought it was wonderful. I don't know if they liked it, they kept looking at me and taking the book. However, I continued my rebelliousness for quite a long time. I didn't follow any orders, I was always boycotting something. I was banned from everything, even from the Spartakiada, because I just stood there during the drill and didn't move at all, so they banned me from it and I didn't practice at the Spartakiada."

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    Praha, 31.05.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 01:17:18
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I don‘t like movies that describe communism as a joke.

Tomas Vydra, 1985
Tomas Vydra, 1985
zdroj: archive of a witness

Tomáš Vydra was born on 23 February 1960 in Prague. His grandmother Ludmila Vydrová‘s brother was Václav Novák, in whose apartment the wounded Jan Kubiš hid immediately after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The Novák family perished in Mauthausen; the witness‘s grandmother was saved from arrest by a brave gendarme in Nebuzele, who concealed her relationship to the Nováks from the Gestapo. Tomáš Vydra lived from 1969 to 1973 in Ghana, where his father Emil Vydra lectured at the University of Kumasi. When his contract from Polytechna expired, his father decided to remain in exile and got a job in Holland. However, Tomáš wanted to return to Czechoslovakia for his grandparents at any cost. Upon his return in June 1973, the whole family ended up in pre-trial detention, from which they were released just before Christmas. The six months in detention scarred the then thirteen-year-old Tomáš so much that he became a lifelong rebel. He refused to study, collected music by Western artists and went to illegal record sales on Sundays. Besides music, his great passion was tennis, which he eventually took up professionally. As coach of Sparta, on 25 and 26 November 1989 he allowed Václav Havel and his friends and associates into the stadium‘s interior, so that they could prepare in peace for the demonstrations on Letná Plain. At the beginning of the 1990s, he began broadcasting the programme Staré poledne on Radio 1, where he introduced listeners to music that was not allowed to be listened to under the communists, but which no one listens to anymore. At the time of the filming (2024) he was living in Prague and was still active in tennis and broadcasting his music show.