"It simply came to our notice then. It was the Sokol gathering and Slávek and I agreed that we would ditch the idea and not go. He had some relatives or acquaintances in America, so we agreed to go to America. So we got together, and in order not to be suspicious that we wanted to run away, we wore a dark dress, a white shirt with a tie, as if we were going on a visit. And then we walked past Třístoličník. As we climbed the hill at night, we heard some policemen roaring along the way. The border on that side of the border was guarded by the police then. Fortunately, they didn't notice us, so we got to the other side. We passed through Austria over to Bavaria. Austria was Russian and Bavaria was American. And from there we just went on. But Slavek injured his leg, and when we were on the Italian border, we went to a camp, where a doctor put him together a bit. But it didn't work out. If something hadn't happened to Slávek's leg, we would surely have made it beyond the ocean. As we got there, we got back. We marched across the border again at night, then we got to Budějovice and then we got home."
"I had a problem once. I had a friend who emigrated to America. That was sometime around the seventies. He came to see his old homeland and went to see me on the radio. But he presented himself there with his passport and everyone immediately noticed. They told me I had a visitor there. I went downstairs and now I see those guards standing there watching and so on. I didn't recognize him, that Eugene. So I went to the gatehouse and said that someone was looking for me there. And the doorman says that there was a gentleman who introduced himself with an American passport. I turned around, and when I realized who was standing there, I knew it would be a mess. I grabbed him, was glad to see him, and dragged him out to the pub. Well, of course I was interrogated because of it. It was trouble, you can hardly imagine how they interrogated me. They immediately figured out God knows what. I claimed it was a coincidence that he arrived. We sat together in the same class at school. Apparently he somehow learned that I was working on the radio, so he came. But just try explaining it to them... They've been bothering me for an awful long time."
"It simply came to our notice then. Imagine a newsroom that broadcasts every hour, sometimes in the morning after half an hour. Each news session was sent from our floor by a special elevator. They made such a small elevator there. They sent it to the floor below where the censors worked, checked the information for about five minutes, and then sent it upstairs before being broadcast."
Miroslav Hlaváč was born on January 4, 1928 in Prague‘s Žižkov district. He was a radio publicist, author of short stories, feuilletons and reports. In 1946 he graduated from a real grammar school in Prague. In June 1948, at the time of XI. All-Sokol Rally, he and his friend Slávek tried to emigrate. They managed to cross the border in Šumava unnoticed and headed for the Italian border, but due to a friend‘s leg injury, they decided to return to their homeland. The unsuccessful attempt to emigrate was kept secret until the 1960s. Miroslav graduated from the Faculty of Law in 1952. However, he never practiced law. Thanks to his sports involvement in ČKD Stalingrad, he did not have to start working as a lawyer in Silesia and got a job at ČKD Stalingrad as a building manager. He married in the mid-fifties, his life partner was a nurse. He accepted the position of assistant at the newly established Department of Librarianship and Journalism at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. His task was to deal with the subject of Josephine and Theresian censorship; it was a hot topic during the communist regime. His texts reworked as non-fiction were not published in a book until 2013 under the title “It was such a Czech miracle”. In the 1960s, he wrote for the fortnightly Nová Praha for five years and then was an editor at Czechoslovak Radio, where he worked in the economics department until his retirement.
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!
