Miloš Zídek

* 1940

  • "If I go back to the fact that the three of us went out with Černohorský and Pavel Kuklik, broke down the door of the room where the shortwave transmitters were, so we sat down next to them and started transmitting. At that time shortwave transmitters were used to communicate all over Europe so that the flight progress would be coordinated. So that we would know who was coming to us, who was going away from us, as a back-up way of coordinating the flight. That is, we worked the network, and I still remember, on the frequencies 46641188 kHz, and we would naively call out on the air, 'This is Prague Control on forty six. We need your help. We need your help. We are invaded and occupied by the Russian and other armies. Please help us. Please help us.' So we did that for two or three hours. Of course, some stations came back to us saying that they were confirming our message: 'We do confirm your message. We do confirm your message.' But it was mostly stations like Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, which was Thessaloniki, it was stations like Nuremberg, like Helsinki, and so on. Of course, nobody from the RVHP countries confirmed it, this call. But we finished very quickly. This took place somewhere between eight and eleven o'clock - in the morning - and around fifteen o'clock in the afternoon, members of the regular army, no reservists, came out the door very vehemently. They didn't treat us nicely and took us into a room where they sat us down on chairs - they didn't tie us up with anything - and two boys with machine guns stayed with us and left. We were there for twenty-four hours."

  • "And then in the following course and not only in the course after August, but especially before August, I was quite active, so to speak. So at that time there was really only one form of change and freedom for me, and that was the Club I think 231 or something like that. No, KAN - the Club of Committed Non-Partisans. And since I come from a family that was always anti-communist, that was the only appropriate activity for me. So I even reproduced the applications, distributed them, and got involved in it by going around to people I trusted, who I knew had a similar political orientation, and asking them to somehow get involved and join this club. In addition, I may have mentioned last time that there was one contact in that Prague Spring society around Alexander Dubček. He was a friend of a distant relative of mine from Ostrava, a miner, who belonged to this kind of group of working class cadres, and who invited me as, in his opinion, an expert on civil aviation to several meetings at the Slavonic House, where I sat at the table even with Šik. And we told each other these fables about how it should be done in the future. Of course, his idea was wrong, because they needed an expert in the whole transport, that is, rail, ship and air, and I was not."

  • "The period that is tied to Legiobanka actually ended between 1946 and 1947, when Legiobanka, like all financial houses, was nationalised. My grandfather became a sort of semi-administrator there, but it didn't last long because he was soon, that is, after the coup in 1949, arrested and imprisoned. And he practically spent the whole pre-trial detention, which lasted almost five years, and later he was convicted in some special trial together with two or three other actors in Czechoslovak finance. He was convicted and he didn't live more than three weeks after the verdict because he died from the consequences of his imprisonment. For me, it is a story that I still remember to this day, even in colour. When in the villa in Benešovská Street, which had been confiscated, and I'll come back to this, in those fifties we were sitting in one room and in one kitchen, which was left over because State Security had occupied the rest, and a tudor, which was a Goliath, which was the car that State Security used to drive, pulled up in front of the gate to the garden. Two men got out of it, a completely classic picture, in leather coats, hats low on their foreheads, and between them they literally carried a man whom I knew as a very efficient gymnast and Sokol member- my grandfather was the mayor of the Sokol in Vinohrady, among other things - and whom they had to carry because his weight was no more than forty kilos. They brought him into our room and my grandfather addressed his wife in a pleading voice, to whom he said, 'Anda, please give these gentlemen some money, they have been very kind to me.' So Anda, my grandmother, dug something up, the gentlemen took it, got into the tudor and left. They quickly took my grandfather to the hospital in Karlak, because our family doctor used to be Professor Pačes, who was the head of the urology clinic in Karlak. Well, my grandfather was taken there - and in twelve hours he died. I don't know if the reasons for his death are important, but one of his kidneys was cut open and he lost the other one, so his organs were unable to survive the whole thing."

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    Praha, 02.05.2024

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    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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    Praha, 21.06.2024

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    duration: 01:51:58
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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“We’re under attack, we need help!” we broadcast from the airport on August 21

Miloš Zídek, 1980
Miloš Zídek, 1980
photo: archive of a witness

Miloš Zídek was born on 3 December 1940 in Prague. His grandfather Josef Doležal, the mayor of Sokol in Vinohrady and one of the founders of Legiobanka, was arrested in 1949 and died after five years in detention from the consequences of communist imprisonment. For a long time it looked like Miloš would be just a metallurgist, but eventually his family managed to get him into the engineering field with a high school diploma. After the war, where he learned to use radar technology, he became an air traffic controller at Prague-Ruzyně airport. He was involved during the Prague Spring and during the August 1968 invasion he secretly sent out cries for help from the airport. This later brought him long-term trouble with the State Security, which blackmailed him and tried to recruit him as a collaborator. In 1974 Miloš Zídek became head of the regional air traffic control centre, although he was not a member of the Communist Party. During his tenure there were several hijackings of aircraft to West Germany. In 1984, he and his daughters went to North Yemen to join his wife, an expert in radiology, who had obtained a job at a hospital in Sana’a. Both spouses were under State Security surveillance in Yemen. Helena Zídková left prematurely after a few months. Miloš Zídek made a dramatic escape to Czechoslovakia, where he resumed his career as an air traffic controller. After the Velvet Revolution, he worked as an expert in air navigation and later moved to the private sector, where he continued to work on the modernization of navigation systems. In 2024, he was living with his wife in Nižbor.