Vladimír Nekvasil

“He was acting as a de-facto liaison between the occupied and the so-called ‘liberated’ France which wasn’t an easy thing to do if you consider that his personal documents were forged. He never spoke flawless French and therefore he had allied, Slovak papers. When Czechoslovakia broke up, the Slovaks gave the resistance movement their blank papers. So my dad was officially Ján Gaspar.”

“The Czechoslovak soldiers who fought in the Spanish civil war had always been for no use to anybody, they started to marginalize them right after the war, when they needed to highlight the role and the merits of Svoboda’s eastern army and to suppress anything else. They actually put them into jail after 1948 – you got very bad marks for being in Spain. It was nothing to boast with at the time. 1968 was a short interplay, but too short really to achieve or change anything of substance. Then came the seventies, the so-called ‘Normalization’ and things were moving in the same direction again as they were after 1948. The Communists had the police and the armed forces in their hands and marginalized those who served in Spain. So the ‘Spaniards’ got used to it – although it sounds a bit cynical – and didn’t expect anything from the Communists anymore. The same is true for the former fighter pilots that served in the British army. But their attitude was one of not regretting anything. They went to the war in Spain voluntarily and derived no benefit from it. They didn’t get a penny for it. No, they did it out of their free will.”

“The French permitted them to come to France which the Czechoslovaks did. My dad was always enthusiastically telling me his stories about the sea. How they played volleyball, founded a singing choir and organized Boy Scout rallies.”

“I think my dad embodies his era – he’s a classical example of his time. He originated in a family that was anticlerical and that was tuned to socialism and history. They left the church and joined the social democrats. My dad was the youngest in the family and studied a secondary school in Prague. I’m pretty sure he strongly promoted Communism wherever he went. He got arrested a couple of times.”