Jaroslav Formánek

* 1960

  • “Eventually, the train set out. I will also never forget this. A weird locomotive which I had never seen before, which was not part of the Czechoslovak Railways, had arrived. It was armored and looked like a big tank or those armored vehicles used by the Bolsheviks when conquering Siberia. A similar locomotive had arrived. It joined the two French carriages and we set out at snail’s pace, bypassing Cheb from the side towards the border. There was a valley there with watch towers at all sides with soldiers, binoculars, assault rifles. The train effectively went through a tunnel of barbed wire so that nobody could jump on top of it from the forests. There was barbed wire all around it. And I was leaving my motherland by entering from a tunnel of barbed wire. We arrived to some point which was probably demarcated and agreed upon with the West Germans. There they detached the locomotive. And also – on each step board there was a soldier with an assault rifle. They guarded the carriages so that nobody could jump in even if they made it through the barbed wire. We entered no man’s land. There they detached the locomotive; the soldiers jumped on it and returned. A West German locomotive arrived from the other side and we arrived to Shirnding which was the first stop in West Germany.”

  • “Jaruzelski took over in the night from Saturday to Sunday. Just over night. The agreement was that Poles deal with it themselves, that the Russians would not go there. But what is not well known is that the Czechoslovak People’s Army had a plan called ‘Action Krkonoše’. The point of it was that we had to be at an alert for a week or ten days. Some units were selected to go to Poland to intervene if the Poles fail. So they had singled out the Cheb unit where I served and moved us towards the Polish border, north of Cheb. There we waited for whatever was about to happen. We listened to Radio Free Europe. We had our equipment packed up, the motors turned on. They always said: ‘Start up the engines.’ So the tanks were rumbling there, waiting, it was obscure. I remember walking up the hill and seeing the amount of machinery. I thought – what if it all went there? Perhaps the Poles will not be like the Czechs and will not only throw paving blocks. It was a moral dilemma; I wouldn’t shoot at the Poles! But what if they shot at me, what else could I do?”

  • “She was crying when she woke me up. I still see it in front of my eyes, her tears pouring. And she told me: ‘Jary, Jary, get up! We need to go to the shop!’ I had no idea what was going on, I thought I was still getting punished for the football match the day before. And she said: ‘Come, we need to go to the grocery shop, there will be war.’ I was looking at her, not knowing what was happening. She pulled up the roller blind and I saw the scene. We lived in first floor with her and grandpa in the second. The windows were oriented towards a crossing where ten meters from me, those huge armored beasts were spinning around. The air was full of diesel and there were crowds of people all around. The whole city was standing on the sidewalks, people responded in various ways. I gazed at it but she knew. She had lived through the war, she was born in 1907 so she even remembered bits from WW I. Although Veselí was not occupied during WW I., she still remembered penury and misery. She witnessed WW II as a grown up woman and mother of three. I thing she was convinced back then that war would break out.”

  • Full recordings
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    Praha, 19.11.2014

    (audio)
    duration: 02:09:49
  • 2

    Praha, 22.07.2019

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    duration: 01:20:49
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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I wanted to get a hold of my life

Eye Direct
Eye Direct
photo: Eye Direct

Jaroslav Formánek was born on 27 April 1960 in Veselí nad Moravou. His father worked as head of a staff canteen and his mother as an accountant. The family lived with Jaroslav’s grandparents in Veselí in a house located near the river Morava. This is where Jaroslav was woken up in the morning of 21 August 1968 by occupants’ tanks and soldiers. In 1979 he graduated from a grammar school in Strážnice where he and his colleagues performed several theater plays based on his scripts and where he published his first pieces in a student newspaper. He enrolled at the Faculty of Pedagogy in Brno but left the studies shortly thereafter. He worked in ironworks in Veselí before moving to Prague where he found a job as a driver in film laboratories at Barrandov. He was in contact with members of the underground including the band Plastic People of the Universe, they would meet among other places in restaurant U Šolců. He had to undertake military service in Cheb which was the last straw to his decision to leave the country. In 1982 he worked in an agricultural collective in Chýně, later him and Rudolf Kučera established another collective in Kamenné Žehrovice and worked in apartment repairs in Prague’s Lesser Town. Through Rudolf Kučera who published an illegal magazine Central Europe, Jaroslav Formánek had access to the so-called samizdat literature and magazines. He attended seminars held in apartments, read a lot and gradually got into writing. His first short story was officially published in 1988 in Mladá Fronta, one of the leading Czech dailies. He was continuously denied the necessary approval to travel abroad. On 15 April 1989 he immigrated to France where he got an asylum at the beginning of July. In Paris he was in contact with the Czech community formed around Pavel Tigrid. The poet Jiří Kolář helped him overcome initial difficulties. In 1992 he was awarded French citizenship. In 2007 he returned to the Czech Republic. He wrote several books, currently works as a journalist, a radio publicist and a translator.