"When we were waiting for a week to see what would happen in Moscow with Dubček and co., we had a doctor of law upstairs in the house, he had lived through a concentration camp. We took the lift with him and of course after a week of waiting to see what was going on, I said, 'Doctor, when are they going to leave [Soviet soldiers]?' And when we got off the lift he looked at us and said, 'Never, young friends.'"
"When our city was renamed Gottwaldov on January 1, 1949, I try to avoid repeating it today, but I think it was the greatest disgrace our city has ever seen. But here it was shown how the Communists had deeply underestimated the fact that by renaming the town, the people would forget, as they had assumed they would, about Baťa. That never happened. In our house we still had a portrait of Baťa in the hallway and I still had a picture of Masaryk hanging in my room, and then there were two small pictures that my parents brought me from the All-Sokol meeting, Masaryk and Beneš, which I had framed and kept in my room at home. The name Baťa, of course, was the key name."
"I remember the bombing of Zlín in 1944, in November, when Daddy was holding the shelter door because the pressure waves literally made the door move. And after the air raid, when the word got out that the gasworks had been hit, everybody shouted, 'Everybody to the hills immediately, take the children to the hospital, we'll take them to the hills.' Mummy came with me to the hospital, to the Bata Hospital, where they loaded us into ambulances, without our parents, and took us to Příluky. There, all I remember is that we were at a chapel, which I used to go to as a boy. I remember that two mothers accompanied us, whom I often met afterwards.
How I got home from Příluky, I don't remember at all."
Bohumil Galásek was born on 30 January 1938 in Zlín. His mother Františka, née Petrášová, worked as a maid. Daddy Bohumil worked all his life as an electrician. Bohumil Galásek graduated from the eleven-year school in Zlín, the Pedagogical School in Holešov and later from the Faculty of Arts of Palacký University in Olomouc, majoring in Czech language - history. As a boy he experienced both bombings of Zlín. He liked going to school and learned everything he could in after-school clubs. His father, a great reader and owner of an extensive library, passed on his love of books and studying to Bohumil. The family bore the communist takeover hard. From 1957 Bohumil Galásek worked as a teacher at primary schools in the Gottwald district. He never accepted the renaming of Zlín to Gottwaldov, the occupation by friendly forces in 1968 and the death of Jan Palach. From 1972 until his retirement, he taught at the grammar school in the Forest Quarter in Gottwaldov and then at the Secondary Pedagogical and Social School in Zlín until 2012. For ten years he has been the chronicler of the town of Zlín and has received many awards for his lifelong teaching activities. In 2024 Bohumil Galásek was living with his wife Josefa in the Malenovice district of Zlín.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
