Antonín Kábele

* 1935

  • "It was noon. Suddenly, I heard a radio announcement: 'Enemy planes approaching Prague.' By that time, the sirens had already started to hook. As I had heard the sound of the approaching planes, I drifted towards the window, looked up the sky and said: 'These are not Germans, these are our planes.' And my dad said: 'Ít's better you come back here.' And I replied: 'Look, It looks like something is tied up neatly together there, and it is falling, which means it must be heavy. And then, there was a big explosion out of sudden, and I flew away from the window – as the pressure coming from the bomb explosion made me so. And so I drifted away from the window. Paradoxically, how a man can behave out of sudden... our dad took us quickly and dropped us off the bed. 'Put your heads down, right there' - as this was the way how we could have saved ourselves! That was complete nonsense, well, one does things like that in such a situation. And so we stayed there. Nevertheless, my brother, he is older, and at the time the bombing started, he had aroused quickly. looked forward and said: 'That house over there is falling!' My dad took him down, and then I aroused quickly from the opposite side and saw how everything was falling apart, how the smoke and everything was coming from there. That constant bombing was going on for about five minutes - that’s just me guessing, though. Then, out of sudden, the house -and I still can feel it even today - just moved, like that. And as it had moved, I started to shout: 'We are falling!' But we did not, it was standing still. Suddenly, the bombing had stopped, we run towards the corridor - without any suitcase, without anything -, dashing down the stairs into the cellar."

  • "But I was given the biggest applause at the 200 meters trail. Despite having a very poor sight… I broke into a run. I had not even tried to jump over it. But I said: 'I cannot step over it, I just don't know how to.' However, some of them started stepping over it. I managed to run up as if I was running the 60 meters trail. And at that moment, the old of Honza shouted: 'Huuu - hop,' as I had landed. So I was happy to jump over my first barrier. You can hardly stop once you are there. And again that: 'Huu - hop!' There was a moment when I stumbled for a second, but still kept running forward. And as approaching the last barrier, I told myself: 'I am going to fall. Then I even extended my steps, instead of making it shorter. Thus, I had hit the barrier from below and fell. I started to look around, to check whether I was bleeding or not, as I take Warfarin regularly. And then, I wanted to pick up the barrier. But I told myself: 'If I pick it up, I will not be able to proceed to the next one.' Everyone was telling me then: 'We were just starring at you, as we thought you wanted to pick it up, to walk around and possibly make another attempt to jump over it.' I said that it was what I wanted to do actually, as I lacked experience. Then I told myself: 'I will break into a run again.' And so I did it and finished the race. And I won. The others were disqualified as they had been stepping over it. I was the one who won."

  • "There was one dad, who was with the Germans - and used to be like one of them - part of the Axis powers. However, his older son was taking liberties with me, beating me up as I was always talking about Czechs. Once I had a stick, I swung around and hit him in the head. He went home and told his father, of course. And so his father came to our house, claiming he would rat my dad, that my dad would go to the concentration camp. We were a bit scared of that; he never did it, though. I am not aware of what was the reason behind, but he never did it. Mr. Schwarz used to live one floor below. He was with the Allies. And Vodičkovi, they used to live right next to. Usually, when we wanted to listen to a foreign radio station, we used to take the radio there; it was like a small cabinet. I don't know how it was possible that, even though they wiped out the signal to prevent us from listening to the foreign radio stations, we were still able to catch it. It was still possible. And there on that button - I can see it as if it were today - there was written on the paper that listening to the foreign radio stations is punishable by death. As such, a certain amount of fear was present there. Nevertheless, we would be coming to their apartment anyway. They would tune in to London, and us to Moscow. And that Mr. Schwarz, he was calling my dead to join the Alliance. Well, he did not do that, you know. He just did not."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 17.07.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 01:55:50
    media recorded in project Tipsport for Legends
  • 2

    Praha, 26.07.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 01:28:56
    media recorded in project Tipsport for Legends
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

In love, everything comes back ten fold to you

Antonín Kábele during a training
Antonín Kábele during a training
photo: Archive of the witness

Antonín Kábele was born on August 16, 1935, in Prague. He grew up in Nové Vysočany, where he also experienced a destructive air raid of the Allied powers on the ČKD factories on March 25, 1945. After the War had ended, he finished his apprenticeship at the ČKD and took up athletics at the same time. He was racing for the Sparta athletics club. Antonín Kábele had been skeptical about the communist regime since its very beginning. In 1968 he founded an offshoot of the Socialist Party of Czechoslovakia within the ČKD company, from where he was fired in 1970. He joined the protests of August 21, 1988 that accompanied the twentieth anniversary of the Invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops. Antonín had signed the Independent Peace Association - Initiative for Demilitarization of Society, which earned him a house inspection. During the summer of 1989, he was collecting signatures on behalf of the Několik vět petition, and was summoned for interrogation by the State Security in autumn of the same year. He started to compete again in 1992, at the age of 72 and has made many achievements. The victories achieved in disciplins he is not used to train for are among the ones he values the most.