Jiří Heřman

* 1946

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  • "I'm going to tell you something that has been bothering me for years. For those who lived through it and remember, we also broadcast, not only us, but first of all the radio, a kind of call to change the signposts. To make it harder for the troops to move on Prague. That was a huge mistake. Why was it a mistake? Look what the square by the town hall looks like, where the tanks that should never have been there got in. And what happened there. Unfortunately, sometimes in good faith, such a thing can happen. It cost a lot of lives..."

  • "We kept on staying there. All the time. The whole crew, including Mirek Hladik, so we were on the air all the time, right up until the launch of Czechoslovak Television. That's all. I showed you the footage of the first broadcasts on the morning of August 25th. After that, we didn't write any more broadcasts. We didn't make written records; rather, we always worked with these notes and went by them. Mirek was a very capable person in that as the editor of LVT. He was born as a broadcaster, although he didn't know it himself."

  • "The twenty-eighth of August sixty-eight is, of course, a day not to be forgotten. On that day, I was looking forward to seeing my friend and colleague Luboš Chotěborský. We went to the Liberec industrial school together and he was supposed to get there at eight o'clock in the evening, arrive by cable car and I was supposed to start training him the next day for the transmitter on Jeětěd. The year before that he was on the transmitter on Javořice. He wasn't a complete beginner, but he was on a completely different technique. That's about all I can say, because there was no time for any technical learning after that, because no sooner had Luboš arrived than at about ten to eleven o'clock big planes started flying over us. Transport and bomber planes. We didn't know what was going on, of course. We went to the cable car hangar and saw two light rivers coming from Hrádek and Raspenava. We still didn't know what was going on. Then, when I tell it further, when we walked outside, we already knew what was going on. They called us from the Vratislavice radio station to see if we knew. Of course, we already knew. By morning we were watching what was going on at all, and I remember today as the first time, because I was two years out of the military service, so of course I recognized the live fire and the practice shooting, and I heard the whistling of bullets from Liberec to the top of Ještěd."

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    ED Liberec, 25.11.2024

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    duration: 27:48
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The assignment was to broadcast, so I broadcasted. The formation of Svobodné Studio Sever (Free Studio North)

Jiří Heřman in the clearance office of the 1st television programme in 1970. Television centre Ještěd.
(Copyright ČTK reserved 265 153/1)
Jiří Heřman in the clearance office of the 1st television programme in 1970. Television centre Ještěd. (Copyright ČTK reserved 265 153/1)
photo: archive of a witness

Jiří Heřman was born on February 28, 1946 in Liberec. From his youth he was interested in transmission technology, he built the first crystals with his friends, which led him to successfully graduate from the Liberec Industrial School. After graduating in 1964, he joined the 1st Signal Regiment in Beroun, where he met the work of Czechoslovak Radio Communications. From October 1966 he worked as a technician at Ještěd, in the building of Czechoslovak Radio Communications next to the radio tower and hotel under construction. During the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops on August 21, 1968, together with his colleague Luboš Chotěborský, he stayed on the summit above Liberec to broadcast. Gradually they switched to television broadcasting via an industrial camera from the LVT (Liberec Exhibition Market) with Miroslav Hladík as the presenter. Václav Havel, Jan Tříska and Marie Tomášová also came to the temporary Free Studio North to broadcast their messages. They were not prevented from doing so by the occupation troops and were thus free to inform the citizens about the tragic events not only in Liberec during the Soviet invasion until August 27, 1968, when Czechoslovak Television began to broadcast officially. At the time of the interview in 2024, Jiří Heřman was living in Mařenice.