He procured explosives for a group led by Vladivoj Tomek
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Ladislav Tonar was born in Prague on 9 March 1934. His father was a clerk, his mother came from a farmer family in the Kolín region and was a housewife. His parents had no other children. During the war, he lived with his grandmother in the Kolín region, witnessed the American bombing of Kolín, and at the end of the war the retreat of Schörner’s army and the arrival of the Red Army. In the tumult of troops reshuffling, he got a submachine gun and a revolver later used in the anti-communist resistance. His father was arrested by the Gestapo in late 1944 on a tip-off claiming he was preparing to help the rebels in Slovakia. He died after release in January 1945. Ladislav Tonar finished his primary schooling in Prague, having returned to his mother after the end of the war. Led by his interest in weapons, he enrolled at the Jan Žižka z Trocnova Military School in Brno in 1950. Due to various adverse experiences with the communist regime, he took part in the activities of an anti-state group led by Vladivoj Tomek. Divided into several sub-groups for conspiracy, the group operated in Prague. Initially, they printed and distributed leaflets with anti-regime content; in December 1952, part of the group (without Tonar) ambushed a military patrol by the Jewish cemetery in Prague-Strašnice, trying to seize their weapons. One of the soldiers was killed and the other wounded in the shootout. Tomek’s group buried the weapons they had since the past and the ones they obtained in the ambush in various places in Prague. They expected an uprising against the regime to break out soon. They also forged passes to the border zone and money, and tried to blow up a part of a railway line in Prague, but the blast was not strong enough. In 1956, they planned a similar attack on the building of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia’s Central Committee at Na Příkopech at the time. Tonar had already served as an officer in the army and procured explosives for the group. In 1957, after several futile attempts to be transferred to Prague to be in regular contact with the group, he left the army at his own request and joined the sewerage company. The group was only discovered in the late 1950s over the forged banknotes. The investigators gradually uncovered the group’s other activities including the 1952 ambush of the patrol. Ladislav Tonar was arrested in January 1960 and sentenced along with others to 16 years in prison for treason in July 1960 by the Municipal Court in Prague. On appeal and thanks to a great amnesty that had just been declared, his sentence was reduced by two years. He began serving in the Bytíz camp in the Příbram region, then he went to Valdice via Bory. He was released on 9 May 1968. He worked with the Prague sewerage company in the years to come. After November 1989, Ladislav Tonar worked at the Ministry of the Interior as a member of the Security Commission that vetted State Security employees.
