“I then went to take the entrance exam at the Academy of Music but I wasn’t admitted there, allegedly for a lack of capacities, but the students led political talks with me and found me to be politically naive and unaware. I was then transferred to the Charles University, Faculty of Philosophy, but that came to naught because we left shortly afterwards.” “Was that some kind of a student committee, the body that decided whom to take and whom not to?” “I don’t know exactly, at first I took a regular examination with various professors. But then I was invited to sit and chat with such a group of politically engaged students who would ask me what kind of party newspapers I was reading and that sort of things. And that was the reason why I failed the admission exams, because I didn’t know any.” “Is there any chance that the occupation of your parents could have played a role in that decision?” “Of course.”
“Yes, the situation was very tense because at that time – during Dubček’s Prague Spring, in the course of those six months – Czechs and Slovaks suddenly started arriving here who had been looking forward to it for a long time. So they would often come directly to our home, they wanted to meet with us, talk with us about the events in Czechoslovakia, report what was going on in the country. Among them were a lot of spies because – as we later learned – the intelligence service had huge gaps in its knowledge about the BBC and in this way, they were able to get a clearer picture about it, by adding many of the missing pieces to the puzzle. It was with the help of this sudden influx of people that they were able to get a lot of new information. It turned out to be that way later on, when people, for example women, were allowed to visit their relatives in Czechoslovakia in exchange for payments. When Husák came to power, as an old attorney, he introduced the option to pay and visit Czechoslovakia twice and then go back again. Most often, you could say almost routinely, pople were kept under the surveillance of the secret police and were also invited for interviews. And there it turned out what they knew about the BBC in order to supplement their information.”
“The important lesson for us to take away here was that after all our experiences from the refugee camps you had to be cautious when dealing with your compatriots. Because there were so many spies among them and they hurt so many people that we would simply shun people from Czechoslovakia. Of course we had some Czechoslovak friends. But one had to be careful.”
Karel Janovický was born on February 18, 1930, in Plzeň, where in the 1940s he attended a school that was ran by the teaching institute. After the war, he became a member of a Boy-Scout troop. In 1946, he camped on the Střela River and between the years 1947 and 1948 near Myslív, on the Myslív Pond in the region of Nepomuk. In 1949, he signed up for the Academy of Music but was refused for political reasons. In October 1949, he emigrated with his future wife Sylva Maiwaldová, crossing the Bohemian Forest (Šumava) into Germany and then Great Britain. They were for a short time located in German refugee camps. In 1962, he began working at the BBC and since 1980 he was the head of the Czechoslovak editorial board. He retired in 1990 and lived in London. Karel Janovický passed away on January, 9th, 2024.
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