"There was a gathering allowed for November 17, so I walked away and then went down the big Albert steps to see what was going on. That's when I had my camera, so I took a picture of how crowded it was, and how there were cops standing backwards - but you can't see that in the picture - than the others who were looking towards the speakers, and they were looking backwards at the crowd. And there were also cops on those Albert steps filming and photographing it. Then the crowd started to move, so I went to those stairs to the Purkyně Institute, and I took some pictures there. It was already relatively late, it was after five o'clock, so it was getting dark. Then they walked up Lumír Street to Vyšehrad, so I also got one picture there, they were carrying a banner saying 'How much longer?' and in the background is Prague Castle. And then I ran out of films, because I hadn't counted on it, so I went home, so I didn't make it to Národní třída. I thought, I don't have any films, so what would I do here. Then the next day I found out what happened."
"By the fact that the regiment's head doctor was on leave, I was allowed to sleep in the infirmary, which I normally wasn't allowed to do, but he wasn't there, so I slept in the infirmary. In the morning, I hear the radio, which could be heard through the wall, the soldiers were playing it, and they were announcing: 'Soviet troops are occupying Košice.' In a moment I hear bangs downstairs, so I go down there to see what's going on, and there's the door to the medical office smashed in, a broken medicine cabinet, and on the steps, on the step by the door, the regiment's chief politician is sitting there crying. I'm standing over him and I say, what are you doing here? And he says, I wanted to commit suicide. I'm thinking, he's got a gun, what's he doing in his office? And he's crying like that, and then it came out - we're being occupied by the Russians. That was the morning of the twenty-first of August, that's how I experienced it."
"We were being occupied by Poles and I went into town to a record and tape shop and I wanted to buy some tapes so I could record what was going on from the radio. And the saleswoman said, I can only sell you one, that's an import, that's a narrow profile. I said, I want to record what's going on right now. Yeah, so if that's what it's for... So she sold me all the ones she had. So I recorded it. Then even the Poles requested the regimental commander, they had some meeting or a meeting with him, so I have a picture of the Poles coming in. And by the fact that the medic in the infirmary was a veterinarian who had studied in Poland, so he knew Polish, so he was a participant in that meeting too. And I told the commander if he wanted to take a picture of it, so I took a picture of the meeting in the room. And then when he was finished, they taped it on a tape recorder, the whole meeting, and when it was over, I took the tape recorder and I rewound it on another tape, and I still have the original to this day, I have to give it, and I gave the copy to the commander."
Přemysl Hněvkovský was born on 13 June 1941 in Prague into a medical family. He had a younger brother Ivan. His father, Otakar Hněvkovský, was involved in the resistance, for which he was interrogated by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Dresden in 1943. He remembered the end of the war in Prague. In 1949, the family moved from Ječná Street to a confiscated villa in Vinohrady, where his father had a private practice. The communists nationalized it at the beginning of the 1950s, and he lost most of his money during the currency reform. In 1955, he joined an illegal scout troop, which operated under the yacht club, and in his spare time he devoted himself to photography, theatre and sports. From 1964 to 1969 he graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of Charles University and specialized in biology and genetics. In 1968 he completed his military service as a doctor in Turnov, where he witnessed the arrival of Polish occupation troops at the barracks. He photographed the subsequent meeting of the two military staffs and made a copy of the recording of the entire meeting. He also documented the events in Prague, the situation the day before Jan Palach‘s funeral, the protests during the victory of our hockey players over the Soviet Union in the spring of 1969 and the demonstrations on the anniversary of the occupation in August 1969. In the late 1960s and 1970s he had the opportunity to travel to Switzerland to visit his wife and with the SSM to France. He worked all his life at the Purkyně Institute in Albertov, where he photographed the permitted student demonstration in November 1989 and walked with the parade to Vyšehrad. He also used his camera on Letná and Národní třída. After the revolution, he worked in a grant agency and retired at the beginning of the millennium. In 2024 he lived in Prague.
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!
