"Then, they sent me to the waiting room to wait for the verdict, and an officer came to me and said, 'You have strange papers, there's something abnormal. You started as a corporal graduate, and ended up as a corporal. It's weird in itself that you weren't promoted, you were just a team leader all along and that's weird.' By the way, I was the commander of a fictional team, I never saw the members of my team. I say, 'Look, I was there to work, not to command.' - 'Well, come to the office number 153.' I went there and they wrote down from a military book what I am, who I am, and then nothing happened for a while. And I received an envelope with a strip from the city military administration. I was scared they were after me again. I came to the city military administration with a military book, I had to hand it over. There was a theatrical setup, armchairs, a counter in the front. To sum it up, there were heroes from Tobruk, pilots from Britain, with me. I suspect that there were also the bereaved of Heliodor Pika, and then there was a man in his sixties and me. Absolutely absurd situation, I felt ashamed. There were people among them, about whom I read books, how they fought during the Second War. So, they apologized to us for the hardships that the Communists had done to us. And then they promoted us extraordinarily according to some categories, lower officers to senior officers down to the smallest as I was. So, within two hours, I became a lieutenant from a corporal thanks to the Rehabilitation Act."
"We worked with nine-toothed hand pitchforks, they were Austrian pitchforks, the so-called RV 9. We had Austrian pitchforks in 1984, Austrian pitchforks for throwing gravel. I don't know how they got to Czechoslovakia, who decided to import them. We did the final modification of the track superstructure, then repairs of the track superstructure on the main track. I have one really rough experience from there. At full speed, we drove gravel on the main track and stood five to ten meters apart. We were throwing gravel, it was a double-track line, where the principle is that you are watching against an oncoming train, if someone threw something or something flew off so that you could see it. It happened to us once that we were watching an oncoming train and another train was driving behind us. In the noise of the oncoming train, we did not hear what was coming behind us. I remember the boy behind me just yelling and jumping. I shouted too and jumped. The boy in front of me shouted and jumped too. I left the pitchforks in the track, they were shattered. I remember the driver sitting in the locomotive with wide eyes, and the men jumping off the track after five, ten meters. We didn't continue working for about an hour, so we were shaking and smoking a cigar. We were done. But we all jumped off the track and nothing happened to anyone."
"We worked on the railway tracks during normal operation, if no new track was built or the track was not modified, then trains ran in the second track. At times, it was the soldier's carelessness that he entered the track when something was passing. Then I remember a case where a crane operator lost his life. He was ordered to lift a heavy load, he did not want to, and the crane overturned while he was in it. So, there were cases like that. Various injuries, fractures. Injuries could occur during such heavy manual work and sometimes quite dangerous work. I experienced that even during my military service."
"I've heard extreme stories told from other departments, but we didn't have an extraordinary situation at our department. Of course, the young soldiers had to do everything. As that their locker got spilled out and they had to rearrange it. Or crawling under the bed was standard in every department. I know there was a boy there, I remember he was an orphan and a miner. He came there for two years. He was so slim and it was terrible because he couldn't defend himself. As graduates, we got into a situation where we defended him. All evil came at him from the senior soldiers, he was an easy victim. As an orphan or a boy from an orphanage, he found himself in the Socialist Labor Brigade in the Ostrava region before the military service. The men took care of him, he became their child and the older miners took care of him. Suddenly, he found himself without their protection and these were unpleasant situations."
"So, I´ve just remembered one hilarious story, such a nice statement from an officer in a military department. He had a question about what cartridge you would load the tank with. Well, with a fragmentation one, and you shoot, and you have to shoot in time, or the imperialist will shoot and turn your tank into a convertible, and we'll spray you out with a hose. So, they roughly told us how to shoot from the tank. Otherwise, there were rumors that were probably not true. Everyone, who went through there, remembers... As some officer was famous there, because he shot down a plane because he understood instead of 'Flying Agrostroj' 'Flying Aggressor'. And he shot down the Čmelák (an agriculture aircraft)."
Petr Hošťálek was born on December 18, 1958 in Prague. His father was a vet, his mother a teacher. He experienced the occupation in August 1968 in Krušné hory and with his grandfather in Žatec, through where Soviet tanks were driving. In 1969, his uncle emigrated to Austria, later living in South Africa, Canada and the USA. His uncle made things worse for the family in Czechoslovakia regarding their cadre file (a file with data on the opinions and ideological attitudes of citizens in the communist era). Petr Hošťálek graduated from secondary grammar school in 1974 - 1978 and after that he graduated from the Faculty of Law of Charles University in Prague, graduating in 1982. During his university studies he got married just for a joke. His wife immediately emigrated to Italy. After the university, he joined the railway army, although at university he went to the military department, specializing in the tank army. Instead of being a commander in the army as a college graduate, he did hard manual labor as politically unreliable, which did not correspond to his university education (he was fluent in English, German and Russian) or to a lowered medical classification. Military counterintelligence had a file on him. During the construction and repair of railways, he experienced serious injuries and a number of dangerous situations in his unit. Service with the railway army reminded him of the hard work that soldiers in the Auxiliary Technical Battalions went through in the 1950s. After the military service, he worked in foreign trade. After the Velvet Revolution, the army rehabilitated him and promoted him from a corporal to a lieutenant. In 2020, he worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and lived in Prague.
Klub vojenské historie Československé lidové armády
autor:
Jaromír Pernička za přispění Jana Smolčáka a Petra Zoubka
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