Jaroslav Novotný

* 1926

  • “A bulletin came saying they were looking for volunteers to the Technische Nothilfe, for assignment to bombed-up cities. The volunteer is to freed from his studies, and this contract would enable him to pass exams once a year. So I, the unfulfilled rebel, let myself get drafted. And that started a whole new world for me. I could already speak German, but it wasn’t easy. We lived in a small settlement called Steele, now it’s on the outskirts of Essen. In the morning we would set out to wherever they needed us. It was demolishing work more than rescuing. It was better to knock the ruins down so they wouldn’t collapse on someone. They collapsed on me once. They dug me out of the rubble, put me on a stretcher, took me to hospital; I recovered there still wrapped up in a lady’s winter coat that some German woman had draped over me. I witnessed the liberation by the English army in hospital – it was there region. I call it ‘crossroads’ – when you’re down in the dumps, you suddenly find purpose again. You don’t know where to go next, and suddenly a solution presents itself. There was an English unit there, which was devoted to de-Nazification, so interrogating Germans, and I interpreted for them. I learnt proper English as well. What luck! I wasn’t in a rush to get home because I was living it out in full, after the war I wore a battledress. What more could I want! It took me a year to get home. I sauntered through Germany, interpreting – for Poles, a bit for Russians, certainly for Slovaks, Czechs, Moravians. The Ruhr Valley was full of ‘Gastarbeiters’, people who had been assigned to labour there, who needed to get home somehow. So we did that.”

  • “So you dream of some kind of nonsense, that Grandma Cibulková has come to visit in Europe, and when she’s about to take her flight home, I’m supposed to look after her. It’s in Vienna, and the queue for the aeroplane leads all the way up to the middle of Mariahilfer Straße, the main thoroughfare in the centre of Vienna. The line drags terribly, so to while away the time you start chatting with people, only to realise that you’ve passed through the checkpoint, that you’re boarding the aeroplane with Grandma, that they’ve seated you and you’re off. Everything goes quite smoothly at Ruzyně Airport, when suddenly the door opens and a enormously fat cop in a fur coat comes in, keeps coming closer and closer, saying: ‘Papers, please.’ Everyone gives him their papers, but I have none. He turns to me and says: ‘And what have we here!’ Rough stuff. A second dream of the sort is also a great favourite. You’re sitting in a tram, and you don’t know how much the fare is, where to buy a ticket, what the ticket looks like, and where you actually want to go. You don’t know anything. The same can also be situated in the underground, which is a complete horror. The emigrant keeps on, and that enormous cop appears again and says: ‘What have we here.’ There are people who couldn’t shake off those dreams, and even after the regime collapsed, they still had them.”

  • “I started with the Egyptology Institute. It was just before my docent degree in inorganics. I liked teaching at university, but once every year I was confronted with the horror of the entrance exams. An encounter with superb, capable people that I would accept at an instance, but most of them didn’t pass. I was really gnawed up by it, I couldn’t take it. So when Zbyněk Žába came looking for someone with a penchant for foreign language and travelling, I became the first employee of the Czechoslovak Egyptology Institute. That very moment I abandoned my promising career and had myself employed as a secretary, chief of transportation, spokesman, restorer, document-maker, and photographer. All in one bundle. Žába and I took a six-o-three [Tatra 603 - trans.] and zoomed off through Germany and France to Marseille and then through Tunisia to Egypt, where there was a big UNESCO project underway to save Nubian monuments. The Egyptology Institute was established. They paid us in crowns, and we were as happy as horses to be outside. And that it all worked out like that, it was actually my new career.”

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    Lysá nad Labem, 10.06.2018

    (audio)
    duration: 02:14:24
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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When you’re down in the dumps and you don’t know where to go next, a solution always presents itself – I call it “crossroads”

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photo: Renáta Malá

Jaroslav Novotný was born on 4 September 1926 in Prague to Františka and Josef Novotný. As a child he took after his uncle Jaroslav’s interest in foreign languages and travelling. He concluded his studies at a secondary chemical-technical school when assigned to forced labour in Essen. After his father’s death he and his mother moved to Lysé nad Labem, where he found employment as a chemist and where he met his future wife Blanka. In 1952 he earned his doctorate in inorganic chemistry, married Blanka, and celebrated the birth of their daughter Michaela. In the following years he taught at a university, but just before completing his docent degree he decided to join an expedition of the Czechoslovak Egyptology Institute to Egypt; he took part in a UNESCO rescue archaeology mission in Nubia, where he stayed for five seasons. He then lectured at a university in Sudan, and in 1970 he and his wife, daughter, and mother-in-law sought asylum in Switzerland. The couple did not stay in Switzerland for long - their first job opportunity took them to Africa, where they remained until 1996, when they moved back to their daughter and granddaughters in Switzerland. After the revolution they bought a house in Lysá nad Labem and lived partly in the Czech Republic and partly in Switzerland.