"Suddenly a situation has arisen - what will be broadcasted? What will be done? What will be the situation? And then immediately check who says what about the arrival of the Russians, and everything possible. I had only one answer to that, because they called me too, and I said, 'Well, what do you think I'm going to tell you? I live nearby the radio and I can show you how our windows are shot our and broken and how in one place there is a bullet in the wall, above the bed in which my youngest daughter sleeps. If she was sitting, she would not be here anymore, she was lying down, so the bullet hit the wall above her head.' - 'And, well all right then.' And they stopped talking to me anymore, as it was obvious that I would not say, 'I did not expect them coming.'”
"I came up with the idea that I wanted it same as Jaroslav Ježek did, and now the conductor came and said: 'Don't you think saxophones will play here?' I said: 'Well, saxophones, of course they will play there. Trumpets, trombones, saxophones, that is jazz music. 'He said: 'Saxophone - a bourgeois instrument! We won't say that - a bourgeois instrument!' I said: 'Well, they can't play the balalaika, because it's a completely different music, and we need to take into account the people who sit as listeners and spectators.' Well so it was agreed and I played it and I got it, I was no longer an instructor, but suddenly I was a director in an army theatre and I was there until 1958, when it ceased to be an army theatre, because Čepička ended up, and it was the Vinohrady theatre again."
"It simply came to our notice then. One was dense. American planes arrived first. They drew a smokescreen in the sky, where they made it as if it was on the train rails; there was a wheel, it was like a station, and they still had it exactly calculated. But it may not have been counted, or miscalculated, that when a wind came, it shifted. And when the planes arrived, the dumb pilot did not know if it was over Germany, or if he was already in Bohemia, or in Moravia, or whereabouts. He was allowed to do so and threw the bombs as they were. So it also affected people who were in the open air and had no idea that a bomb could fall on them, and the barracks took it away. During this bombing, my brother, the one that goes to see. We were hidden in the basement and he ran out into the yard and climbed the shed to see what the division looked like. That was pretty stupid, of course. But suddenly a bomb fell, it swept him away, it flew out of it with that pressure [wave], the compressed air, it swept him away, and down on his four he crawled back into the cellar and didn't get out. Nothing happened to him, but it was those conditions that were just bad."
Radio, theatre and television dramaturg, director and screenwriter Gustav Oplustil was born on August 2, 1926 in Hranice na Moravě. Due to the war, he could not study at the business academy, so he trained as a barber with his uncle. Here, among other things, he portrayed actors from amateur theatre and soon joined them himself. During the war he worked as a theatre instructor in the Vít Nejedlý Art Army Ensemble, after the war as a props, inspector and actor at the Beskydy Theatre, where he also wrote screenplays for plays and fairy tales for children and adults. He later worked at the Central Army House in Dejvice, where he played a puppet theatre for children, and then was accepted to the Czechoslovak Army Theatre in Vinohrady, where he worked for five years. In 1958, he received an offer for the position of screenwriter and playwright on Czechoslovak television, from where he is best known for entertainment programs, cabaret shows, shows and New Year‘s Eve evenings. Gustav Oplustil died on October 21, 2022.
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!
