Petr Čermák

* 1942

  • "There was a doorman in uniform and he said, 'The captain is coming for you,' I'll think of a name now, Captain Novotný. The captain came, a smiling gentleman, with the keys. One barred door - click, the other - click. 'Sit down here.' Then two men came, as it happens, one nice, one bad. They let me sit there for a while and one said, 'So what shall we talk about?' I thought, naively, that it was about my previous work in West Germany. I said I'd give them a bit of a ride and said, 'There were three of us, it was an industrial diamond company. We had the keys to the factory, that's right. And since we wanted to get out of Germany early, we went there on Saturdays and Sundays. They didn't like us there on Sundays, they kept the Christian feast according to the Ten Commandments. Still, they said, 'You can do it on Sunday, as long as you don't draw attention.' So we used to go there on Sundays to move ahead at work.' I unleashed this, but I found out they weren't interested, and about halfway through, the bad guy said, I think he spoke to me on first-name terms, 'Enough of that crap. What's up with that American from Vysočany?' I was puzzled. Three or four months earlier, I had met an émigré by the name of Petr Pulkrábek. I had rowed with him in the military. He emigrated to America. I ran into him at the U Fleků pub and in the marina; they allowed him to come to see his seriously ill mother. I was puzzled and didn't know what kind of Američan from Vysočany they meant. I forgot in three or four months that I had meth him. - 'You met him at U Fleků, he threw around cash, he pulled a few hundred crowns out of his pocket.' The waiter said, 'Don't show off the cash, it's dangerous here, you might lose it.' They knew it all; someone had been following him, and they likely didn't know who I was. They spent three months finding out who I was, and that's why they summoned me. I was taken aback, I couldn't react, they started squeezing me. At the end, they gave me a blank paper to sign. I said, 'Don't get me wrong, gentlemen, I'm not signing a blank paper for you.' 'If you don't want to, you don't.' They dictated something to me, about three quarters of a page. I was dumbfounded and didn't know what I was writing. It said that I was being treated decently and wouldn't talk about the interrogation even to my own family, which I didn't comply with. At the end they threatened: 'Don't think you will ever go abroad again. We make the decisions, not your boss at work.'"

  • "What you feel? When you row, you don't feel being low on oxygen, you just feel increased fatigue. It shows in the time; you don't deliver the time you would deliver at a lower altitude. The suffocation also showed in the fact that we didn't do the finals with a full crew. Milan Hurtala choked internally in the initial race, meaning... I may get a bit technical and not completely correct now, but he ended up with swollen liver and kidneys. He couldn't recover for the finals, so we went with a substitute. I should point out that we weren't the only ones. There were several other eights who went with a substitute. The West Germans had counted on it, they had substitutes for most posts, but we didn't. We had to take whoever was available. We took Kolesa from a two with [the coxswain], they didn't make it to the next round and were available for the finals. I can't blame him for not fitting in with the eight, but the fact is that the two with [a coxswain] is the slowest discipline and the eight is the fastest discipline. The way they cut the water is utterly different. It was a handicap for him and for us. The training sessions we did with him were fine, it's just that it's not two kilometres. You do one-minute bits, five hundred, two hundred metres, but never two kilometres."

  • "You know, it was already thawing before 1968. I may not be a revolutionary, but the situation began to improve under President Antonín Novotný already. It was completely different from the 1950s. Of course, everybody expected something radical to happen during the Prague Spring. At that time, the Olympics were the primary event for us and we perceived this, but we were more focused on sport than on what was happening around us. We had a hard time swallowing up the invasion, though, that I remember clearly. I know Venca Kozák was an officer and he said this memorable sentence: 'Give me a gun, I'm an officer and I'm going to fight.' It was silly, of course, but he voiced what we were all feeling."

  • "It was the perfect, beautiful autumn weather. No emergencies the whole time, except for the final the wind picked up so hard they had to interrupt and wait for two hours until the wind turned around and blew as an almost perfect headwind. They said it was correct though it wasn't completely so. But, whatever, let it blow, you have to take that into account. By delaying the start, the eights were running in complete darkness. We got to the start and the sun was just setting. The course was west to east, and as we rounded the buoy I saw the red sun disappear on the horizon. It's pretty down south, so the sun set and it got totally dark. There was a road on the shore, with cars driving and headlights shining, and flares shooting at the finish. We could see how the competitors were doing, everyone. It wasn't so dark that we didn't know there were the Americans on the right, and on the left the Yugoslavs, the Russians, the Germans, the Italians. The coxswain gives you instructions. You're not allowed to look around, but everybody looks, even though they should hold on to the oar and work it as hard as they can."

  • "Dukla's rowing club was in Terezín. When I was in the draft office, I had to do some formal stuff, take a medical examination, and then they asked me where I wanted to go, what weapon. There were engineers in Terezín, the scum of the army, and I was told before: 'To avoid complications, say you want to join the engineers.' So they asked me, 'Comrade, which weapon would you like to serve with?' I said the engineers, and the guy says, 'That's strange, considering you completed an engineering high school. You could sit comfortably on a radar truck and watch planes flying over Europe on a screen, how about that?' I said I wanted to join the engineers in Terezín. He turned to the scribe: 'He's totally dumb. Register him for Terezín, engineers.' When I enlisted, they took us to Bohušovice, about three kilometres away from Terezín, there's no train service. Even though there was an old track from the Nazi ghetto era, they put us on a truck and dropped us off in the Terezín barracks yard. Shortly before that, the film Transport from Paradise was made there, and so the barracks still had those gothic letters on them, twisted German letters, 'Block 1A', 'Block 4'. I thought, 'What a treat, these inscriptions - isn't it great? Two years in here!"

  • "I remember 1948, a short stretch again. There were three houses next to each other where I lived. I was friends with the Černý family, Mr. Černý was a great man. I remember I was just playing with the boys when Mr. Černý... You see, we had a single-tube radio, and you couldn't hear anything when the sun was shining on it; you couldn't even receive Prague 1. He says, 'Go to your dad and tell him it's too bad, they've elected Gottwald as the president.' I ran down the street yelling, 'It's too bad, Dad, they've elected Gottwald as the president!' My mom yelled at me to shut up and go home. I remember the trials in the 1950s, via radio again. I remember the screechy voice of Attorney General Urválek; that's an experience I still hear to this day."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 10.07.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 02:03:00
    media recorded in project Tipsport for Legends
  • 2

    Praha, 14.07.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:55:46
    media recorded in project Tipsport for Legends
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Rowing earned him an Olympic bronze as well as an interrogation at the StB

Petr Cermak (far left) pictured with medals from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics where the Czechoslovak eight came third
Petr Cermak (far left) pictured with medals from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics where the Czechoslovak eight came third
photo: Witness's archive

Petr Čermák was born in Prague on 24 December 1942. His mother Marie Dojáčková came from a Czech family living in Vienna. The Dojáčeks moved to Prague’s Vinohrady before the First World War. Father Karel Čermák came from Sedlčany. As for the Second World War, Petr Čermák remembers the roar of Allied bombers bombing Prague in the winter and spring of 1945. Following elementary school, he joined a mechanical engineering school and started rowing with Blesk Praha at about 15 years of age, although the club was called Slavoj in the 1950s. Graduating from high school, he worked at TOS Hostivař for about a month and then enlisted in the military with the Dukla Terezín rowing club. He first had to master basic military training, then he rowed at a top level. In Terezín he met coaches and legendary rowers Vojtěch Hvězda and Václav Kozák. He represented Czechoslovakia as a member of the eight team at the 1962 World Championships in Lucerne, Switzerland. In 1964, he was nominated for the Summer Olympics in Tokyo where the eight team won bronze medals. He received a reward of 1,500 crowns for coming third and another 500 crowns as a bonus from the director of TOS Hostivař. In 1968 he was preparing for the next Olympics in Mexico, and met his future wife Jiřina, who won a silver medal as a field hockey player at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, during a training camp in Piešt’any. It was in the training camp in Piešt’any that he experienced the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops on 21 August 1968. At the Olympics in Mexico, he came fifth with the eight and then retired from the national team. In the 1970s, he took up field hockey, and was an official of the Slavoj Vyšehrad club where his wife was a player. He worked at TOS Hostivař and the company sent him to West Germany for six months as an engineer, taking part in the design of a new machine for processing industrial diamonds. On return, he refused an offer to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) and avoided membership of the Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship Union. Before 1989, he was summoned for questioning by the State Security Service (StB). The reason was that he gave a tour of Prague to a former fellow rower who had emigrated to the USA. He embraced the fall of the communist regime at the end of 1989 because he was no longer concerned of speaking his mind openly and could quit pretending. He was living in Prague in 2023, a widower with a daughter and two grandchildren.