"We were assigned to Komárno. We left Pardubice by train and went all night. In Komárno, in the terrible fortress that was built against the Turks, across the Váh on one side and across the Danube on the other. Visually, it was a repulsive, terrible structure. There we learned, unfortunately, that we are the flowering of the nation, in quotation marks, and that by work we will have to make sure that the working class takes us into account at all. We were in Komárno only for twenty-one days. We were unarmed. Just right sideways, left sideways, Comrade Captain, let me speak to you. After those twenty-one days, we were assigned to individual batches and I got from Komárno to Liptovský Hrádok, where the sub-Tatra airport was to be built. "
"I had some English texts with me, but they were English texts in which we learned English in the octave, and I think still in the seventh year. It was just five year plan, two year plan, and these socialist, political things. And I had this with me during the compulsory military service. My supervisor asked me, 'What do you have here?' And I said that since I cannot learn this at school, I'll read the textbook here and there, to I'll see if I still understand it. And he tells me, 'No, you have it because you don't want to forget that English, so that when the Americans come here, you'd be able to talk to them.You must send it home!" So I had to go to the post office, put the notebooks into envelopes and send them home."
"When a pilot needs to eject from a crashing jet, these are the supersonic planes - a thousand kilometers per hour, so he doesn't have time to open a hatch above him, that's not possible. He must be out there in a second. Not just an open hatch, out of the plane. I was part of the company that made the equipment, and I designed a new type of solid fuel. The fuel, when it burned down, created a lot of heat and a fairly high pressure, and it was able to pull the pilot out of the plane with the chair. When he was still strapped in the plane, he tapped the belt, with a chair on one side and a pilot on the other. A reserve parachute opened for him, he pulled out a large parachute and the pilot was rescued. This looks like a fairy tale, yes, but it still works away. ”
„Once we went home from our shift with Mirek Zrzavý through Knížecí and Malostranské square. And we thought we could have a beer somewhere. But those days they made it as strong as nineteen degrees and we had two or three. That´s like coming out of the wine cellar. Mirek started showing me what he learnt in Wehrmacht, how he´d fall forward with his hands bound behind his back. He fell on the pavement and blood started spurting out. And damn, there was an ambulance just passing us. They took us both and drove by tatraplan car. They took us all the way to the garrison command near the Powder tower. The boys thought it is some kind of an inspection. When they say PTP guys, they calmed down. They wrote down what´s wrong. Well we were quite loaded. I told them: ‚Comrades, I need to call our central in Střešovice, that we´re locked here, so that they wouldn’t think we ran away.‘ Lieutenant Veselka took it in a totally calm way. He represented the political matters and was a former driver. We woke up in the morning and someone had to pick us up. A sergeant came for us, who was supposed to go civil on the very day. He was already wearing civil shoes and they locked him up too. Finally lieutenant Veselka himself had to come for us. The first thing we did was to thank them and we went up to Bílá labut restaurant to have a beer. Together with the lieutenant.“
„They didn’t really educate us very much. Political education was done in a following manner. It was done in the rooms. We got the brochures and read them out loud. Those responsible for explaining it to us sometimes could not even sign themselves! One of us would stand between the doors and when he caught then we opened the brochures. Otherwise priests and monks would explain us what love and other is from a philosophical point of view. That way we were trained in Prague. I remember it by now.“
„From Čáslav we went to Pardubice, there we got lunch at the commerce academy. We went to the former Jewish synagogue to see an exhibition of parachutes and radios of American agents, who jumped down here and apparently would try damage us. We had to get through it. In the evening they took us to personal trains and we went to Moravia. We didn’t know exactly where. In each carriage there was a corporal or lance corporal with a machine gun. But there were guys among us, who were in prison and even tried to escape and they´d say: ‚Watch out, guys! Still we don’t know where we´re going, but surely it´ll be no fun.‘ Then we got to Komárno.“
„Each year Slavia Praha would go to Přelouč during fair. It was the second garniture, Bican or Plánička didn’t come of course, but sure there were aces. In the morning they taught us, how to kick the tens, corners etc. In the afternoon there was a football match of AFK Přelouč against SK Slavia. The result has been agreed – ten to one to Slavie. Slavie footballers were always taken to lunch by local butchers and tradesmen. And then they met at the match. After the match they´d sit in a student´s pub U Žabků.“
„My mother was from Kouřim. And when I was born, I spent some time there. My daddy was a specialised teacher. He studied in Moravia and comes from Polička. He was in Kouřim for a while, but not even a year later he got a job at a primary school in Přelouč. Since then we´d live in Přelouč.“
Vladimír Syrový was born on July 15, 1931 in Kouřim to a teacher’s family. The mother came from Kouřim and the father was originally from Polička. In the first year of the witness’s life, his father got a new job and a city apartment in Přelouč, where the family moved and where his parents lived until their death. Vladimír Syrový has one younger brother. In his youth, in Přelouč, he devoted himself mainly to amateur theater, sports and the boy Scouts. After graduating from middle school, he entered gymnasium in Pardubice. After graduating, he was accepted to the Research Institute of Organic Synthesis in Rybitví in 1951 as a laboratory assistant. At the end of August 1952, he entered compulsory military service, where he was assigned to the Auxiliary Technical Battalions. After basic military training in Komárno, he worked as an auxiliary construction worker on various constructions in Liptovský Hrádok, in Tatranská Polianka or in Dubnice nad Váhom. After a year, he was transferred to Prague-Střešovice. Here he again took part in various constructions in the workers’ professions - apartments for Soviet attachées in Podbaba or the International Hotel. He was in the military service for a total of 28 months. He married his longtime girlfriend Dagmar Tomková in 1956 and they raised two children together - a son (1957) and a daughter (1964). They have lived in Pardubice since 1961. He completed part-time university studies in 1961 at the Institute of Chemical Technology in Pardubice and later passed two postgraduate state exams. In 1954 he joined the Research Institute of Industrial Chemistry, where he worked until his retirement. He dealt mainly with industrial chemistry and internal ballistics of weapons. He participated in the development of the explosive charge of the ejection seat for supersonic aircraft developed by Aero Vodochody. In 1991 he became an active member and later secretary of the District Club PTP Pardubice, for which he actively worked until its abolition in 2016.
JUDr. Jan Decker (Chairman of the PTP Association), Vladimír Syrový, Ing. Roman Línek - membership meeting of the PTP District Club, Pardubice, 14 January 2015
JUDr. Jan Decker (Chairman of the PTP Association), Vladimír Syrový, Ing. Roman Línek - membership meeting of the PTP District Club, Pardubice, 14 January 2015
