Ing. Stanislav Synek

* 1937

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  • "When I think of what Prague looked like before 89' - it was so neglected, but it was the magical Prague. And everyone agreed that the magic was there. It was lost completely, with the crowds of tourists, the commerce. Basically, I'm not tempted to visit big cities anymore, or even small towns. When I do travel somewhere, I try to go to the countryside, to the countryside, to the mountains, where it's not nearly as affected. I mean, in the Himalayas, for example, it already is, but I'm sure there would be plenty of places in the Himalayas. It's all difficult. There are still some beautiful places, still pristine, but it's hard to get to them. Far more difficult than it used to be. All the means of transport and everything is easier, but to find such places is more difficult than when I was travelling in the sixties."

  • "The escort consisted of two Toyotas that went with us and were helpful. Then it turned out to be very positive for many reasons. But it took about a month to sort this out. We were in Beijing - it was very welcome for us to suddenly be staying in a hotel rather than in that cramped car where we were fed up - and we were enjoying life there. It's all very different there - there were still these hutongs, these low endless shacks, cooking on the street, everything on bicycles. There was a huge boulevard, wide, where there were all bicycles, sometimes a limousine would go by - where today there are many, many streams of cars. That was terribly interesting for us, a wonderful thing from a travel point of view. So it (the permit) was being processed and we were exploring (Beijing) and all of a sudden - we didn't even know anything - but all of a sudden I see a parade coming. There were maybe fifty, a hundred people carrying a banner. That was quite strange, you could see people completely staring. And we had the opportunity to watch this growing, day by day. It was actually amazingly fortunate that we were there at that time and for that long. If we had gotten the permit right away, we would have gone again; we were there like that for a month, and we could watch it. And it was amazing how it grew after that. Then I was in that one demonstration, and there were I think two million people there. That was something unimaginable. From that tiny size, how it grew. It was also dangerous in a way: for example in that Tiananmen Square, there are government buildings there and there were these crowds. And then there were armed men, soldiers of some kind, guarding it. There's no violence, but if someone, some provocateur, started something, they would start shooting and there would be panic. And basically every one of the Chinese had a bicycle. Now imagine that - two million people with bicycles getting trampled. That would be something terrible. We've seen this all grow up. Then the school holidays came, so it calmed down, students started going home, the activity dropped."

  • "When going abroad, you had to hand in your military book and then pick it up again when you returned. I went to pick it up and there I was surprised. My military book was returned to me, but as I went through my military training in college, I gradually reached some ranks, up to lieutenant. Right on the title page is a list of ranks - it starts with private, lance corporal, etc. etc., up to that lieutenant. And there's always a date next to it from when. That was crossed out in red pencil, and underneath that it said 'private'. So I was demoted. Which I thought, "Well, all right, it doesn't matter if I have a rank or not, I don't really care. But I care a bit, anyway.´ Because if you're a private, you can go abroad. But when a private is stripped of his rank as an officer, that's very suspicious. So I sat down and wrote a complaint to the ministry. I was summoned, and I got my military book, and indeed it was crossed out Private and it said Lieutenant of the Czechoslovak People's Army. Which I felt, when I left the ministry, I had this triumphant feeling. I said to myself that perhaps not even Stanley could have had that feeling when he discovered Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika after many months of searching. I even got my passport - I got my military book from the military administration and I picked up my passport from the Ministry of Home Affairs, so I could travel. I was given satisfaction and by speaking up, my arguments were acknowledged. So then I could travel normally again."

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    Praha, 19.12.2024

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    duration: 02:05:01
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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    Praha, 19.12.2024

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    duration: 02:12:40
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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Trifles and travel

Stanislav Synek during recording in Prague
Stanislav Synek during recording in Prague
photo: Post Bellum

Stanislav Synek was born on 15 May 1937 in the village of Stará Hut’ in the Příbram region just a few years before the outbreak of the World War II. His father Josef was born in 1909 and came from Stará Huť, his mother Anna, née Šimková, came from Prague. From the war years, he remembers reciting pro-Nazi poems at school, the fierce deportation of the Germans and especially his mother’s arrest and approximately one month of imprisonment by the Gestapo. The post-war period was already merciful: he studied at the grammar school in Příbram and later at the Faculty of Technical Nuclear Physics at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He was interested in philosophy and philology. He worked as a tour guide, so from the 1950s he travelled first in Eastern Europe, and in the 1960s in Western Europe. Immediately after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, in October 1968, he went on a long-term exit permit, first to Switzerland and then to Canada, where he was employed as a fuel engineer at the Bruce nuclear power plant. When he returned in 1970, he was unemployable because of his two-year stay in the imperialist West. However, he took the opportunity to obtain freelance status and made a living as an interpreter and translator. Whenever he could, he travelled. In 1986, he was offered his dream job: a two-year round-the-world expedition. As a navigator and translator, he ended up spending three years with Tatra on the round-the-world trip. He experienced arrest on suspicion of espionage in Guatemala, and in China he took part in anti-government protests in Tiananmen Square. He heard about the Velvet Revolution on the radio during a personal inspection at a border crossing in Africa. After returning to Czechoslovakia, he continued to work as a translator and interpreter and travelled in his spare time.