"I went to Plzeň to my parents' house to pick up my things. There, by the way, I also found [my essay assignment in which I wrote] how the counterrevolution was defeated thanks to Soviet help. And there's the kind of game people play - what five books would you take to a deserted island. And I used to play it, fortunately. So here it was of some use to me. I knew exactly which five books to grab. One was 'After All, Flying Is So Easy', [the other] was 'My Friend Pierot'. Now there were no trains running, they were running as shuttle trains, so I was partly hitchhiking and partly on these shuttle trains. I got to Pilsen, then back to Černošice. And we decided to leave. And I didn't even have a passport by then! [But] I had an uncle at the passport office who - now I can say it - gave it to me, which was such a mess everywhere at that time... 'Chaos' is the correct Czech word, a foreign word. It turned out that I didn't even need the passport after all. What was nice was when we took a taxi... It was martial law, so to get from Černošice to the main station, we took a taxi, and the taxi driver had his wife and young son with him. And he said, 'You know, I think [that] if they shoot me from the tank here, there would be an orphan and a widow. What are they going to do? They'd better take us all.'"
"[On] 21 August, we woke up and my father-in-law said, 'They are occupying us.' Jarmila had some Dutch friends in Prague at the time, so we were envious that they could pack up and leave. And I kept expecting us to fight back. And it's understandable, because there were always such interesting cryptic messages on the radio. Like [that] the tuna was looking for a scooter and stuff like that. I thought it was cryptic messages that we were already organizing armed resistance here. And so I was ready at that moment, at that time, in those days, to go and fight the Russians and even die. It was so strong... Because the hopes that we had were so beautiful and strong that this was just a perfect cold shower. But the messages about the tuna looking for the scooter and the fox found the orange, just the coded messages [were] fine, but still nothing happened. So I thought, and I said to Jarmila, why don't we go too..."
"A man had two faces. It was an interesting time. You could trust someone as conditionally as you could trust someone. That you trusted him on many things, but you wouldn't tell him a political joke, for example, because what if he was a cop... I'm getting ahead of myself again. I'm getting very, very ahead of myself. Then I was in California and I avoided the Czechs there. It seemed to me that they were people who automatically made some kind of claim on me. Like I owed them something or something. One time a Czech visitor came there too and I didn't get that impression at all. Well, the way it is, yeah, if someone pushes you, you back off, if they don't push you, they pull you in. That made me care a little bit more about him. I showed him things, I drove him around... That was at Stanford. I took him to my house. I was living with an American painter at the time. And I just liked him very much. [But] still, I had this warning red light, and so I called a friend in Canada who might know him. I said, 'Hey, this guy, isn't he a cop?' And my friend said, 'He is.' [I said,] 'Oh my...' Then I took the guy to the airport when he was leaving. Before that, I still cleverly, cheekily, or cunningly... As I took him to my place and we were watching a TV program together, [which was] just about the FBI, I said, 'See this, this is about how we're going to squeeze all these Communist spies here!'"
Václav Chvátal was born on 20 July 1946 in Prague to Anežka Chvátalová, née Kaňáková, and Josef Chvátal. While his mother was a critic of the communist regime, his father was a supporter. Nevertheless, before 25 February 1948, he publicly criticised the communists, and was fired from the Ministry of Heavy Industry in Prague. From 1949 he worked as a clerk at the Regional National Committee in Pilsen. Václav Chvátal studied ceramics at the Secondary Industrial School of Construction. He then studied at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University, where he was greatly influenced by the extraordinary teacher Zdeněk Hedrlín. Václav Chvátal was a member of Pioneer and chairman of the Czechoslovak Socialist Youth Union local organization. On the threshold of adulthood, he gave up his pro-regime views and experienced an inner conversion. On 24 August 1968, he emigrated to Austria with his wife, Jarmila Chvátalová, née Klimtová. However, he later divorced her. In 1970 he completed his doctoral studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada. He taught alternately at universities in Canada and the USA. On 29 December 1989, he married Markéta Vyskočilová, daughter of the writer Ivan Vyskočil, in Canada. Fifty-one years later, he returned as a professor at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University. In 2003 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Université de la Méditerranée. In 2015, he received the John von Neumann Prize for operations research theory. He is the author of a number of publications. At the time of the recording, in 2024, he was living in Prague with his second wife, Markéta.
Václav Chvátal in a bar with the hostess Fumiko Yano, to whom he dedicated an article together with the Japanese mathematician Jin Akiyama, probably 1976
Václav Chvátal in a bar with the hostess Fumiko Yano, to whom he dedicated an article together with the Japanese mathematician Jin Akiyama, probably 1976
The wedding of Václav Chvátal and Markéta Vyskočilová in Montréal, at which they were married by an Irish priest, took place on her twenty-seventh birthday on 29 December 1989.
The wedding of Václav Chvátal and Markéta Vyskočilová in Montréal, at which they were married by an Irish priest, took place on her twenty-seventh birthday on 29 December 1989.
Bill Cook (far left) and Václav Chvátal handing over their gift to J. P. Donleavy in Toronto (who opens one of his books with a statement about the Irish: "They don't even have a potty to piss in"), autumn 1987
Bill Cook (far left) and Václav Chvátal handing over their gift to J. P. Donleavy in Toronto (who opens one of his books with a statement about the Irish: "They don't even have a potty to piss in"), autumn 1987
Inaugural Combinatorial Seminar at Bellairs Research Institute; standing: Godfried Toussaint, Ryan Hayward, Václav Chvátal, Paul Seymour, Bill Cook, Klaus Truemper, Stefan Olariu, Kara Lynn Klarner; kneeling: Bruce Reed, Sue Whitesides, David Avis, David Klarner; Holetown, Barbados, February 1985
Inaugural Combinatorial Seminar at Bellairs Research Institute; standing: Godfried Toussaint, Ryan Hayward, Václav Chvátal, Paul Seymour, Bill Cook, Klaus Truemper, Stefan Olariu, Kara Lynn Klarner; kneeling: Bruce Reed, Sue Whitesides, David Avis, David Klarner; Holetown, Barbados, February 1985
