Tomáš Etzler

* 1963

Video Player is loading.
Current Time 0:00
/
Duration 0:00
Loaded: 0%
Progress: 0%
Stream Type LIVE
Remaining Time -0:00
 
1x
  • "I remember it was eight o'clock in the evening. The satellite phone doesn't work inside, you have to go outside. I couldn't go in front of the school because it was so dangerous, because whenever something moved there, they would immediately start shooting. So I went out in that yard, I remember, it was April 12th at 8 o'clock at night to call Atlanta again. And I was still dialing the number and all of a sudden there was a terrible explosion. They hit...a mortar shell hit that school yard. Two soldiers there practically bled to death in a matter of minutes. They were wearing helmets and Kevlar, but the grenade fragments tore their legs completely apart. In all, nine men were wounded including the dead. Another two or three had to have parts of their legs amputated. I had two fragments in my back. I am tall, under the bulletproof vest, one fragment in my head, they hit me also in the finger. But I was very lucky because I was leaning against this wall and it protected my legs. So I had nothing on my feet at all. That was a shok, and on top of that, just the slaughter that was going on there, the soldiers bleeding, it was crazy."

  • "I always admired Václav Havel, I liked him very much. My father probably played a role in that, as he used to let us read his books. Not only theatre plays, but also essays and various reflections, and I just admired him. I was very fortunate to have interviewed him twice for CNN. The first time in 2000, when he was still president, and the second time in 2009, he was no longer president. It was the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution when I conducted the interview directly. He was awfully nice and polite. I'm not moved by politics, but I remember coming home from filming in Beijing one day in 2011, and I sat down at my computer, opened my emails, and now I see Václav Havel Václav Havel everywhere in the subject line. That was the day he died and it brought tears to my eyes. So he was a man... He had some... I consider him a terribly fair, of course nobody is flawless, but an awfully fair person. He gave the Czech Republic a very good name. People admire him all over the world.

  • "September 11... I was working in a foreign newsroom at the time as a foreign news editor, working night shifts. So we would go to work, they would rotate us, and I would work night shifts for four months and then morning shifts again. There you go twenty-four hours a day for three shifts. And we worked from about 9:30 to about 7:30 in the morning. So I'd come to work at ten o'clock at night, and I'd stay at that job in the morning. I don't remember why, I was still finishing up some computer work, and at 9:00 in the morning, like every morning at CNN, there was a big editorial meeting of all the bureau chiefs and their deputies. That was one floor up from our newsroom. And after nine o'clock, I was turning off my computer and getting ready to go home. When I get up, I see all these bosses running down the stairs. I was like, there's a fire or something, I've never seen such a run in my life. So I stopped my boss Parisa. And she told me, if I could stay there a little longer, that a twin skyscraper in the United States had been hit by a Cessna, like a small plane."

  • "I didn't know what it would look like in the United States. I went to the United States on a tourist visa, I knew two people in the whole of America and I had limited English at the time and I had no idea. But I knew I was going there forever. I wasn't going there for a vacation, I was going there with the determination that I would somehow make it there. In what and how I had no idea, of course I hoped it would be some kind of TV or film world, but I went there basically completely blind. I was there with Lucie, and when we left, we had a hundred dollars in our pockets. That's all we had left. And we had two backpacks of our possessions."

  • "In June 1989, when I was at a semi-legal concert of the Dog Soldiers (Psí vojáci) in Ostrava, who performed there under the acronym PVO, Filip Topol, with whom I had become friends in the meantime, slipped me Several Sentences. And I thought to myself, I can't keep playing it both ways. I can't be friends with Filip Topol and share his views and world view and then go and work for communist TV. So I signed it, knowing what the consequences would be. But nothing happened at first, so I thought maybe I could get away with it. I could not. Because about a month and a half later, they read my name on the Voice of America and on Free Europe as a signatory. And I was relatively decently dismissed from Czech Television and ended up at the military service."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 21.06.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 01:54:03
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 2

    Praha, 02.08.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 02:02:38
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

If bullets aren’t flying around your head, you’re not living

Tomáš Etzler, 1971, Ostrava
Tomáš Etzler, 1971, Ostrava
photo: Archive of Tomáš Etzler

Tomáš Etzler was born on 1 April 1963 in Ostrava as the first-born son of Marie and Miroslav Etzler. Three years later, his brother Miroslav was born, who became an acclaimed actor. Tomáš Etzler was very active from a very young age and played a lot of sports, winning athletic competitions until he was a junior. He was strongly influenced by his father Miroslav, who was a teacher at the University of Ostrava. He gave his sons banned literature to read and explained to them the pitfalls of the totalitarian regime. After grammar school, Tomáš Etzler entered the Faculty of Education, majoring in geography of physical education. He successfully graduated in 1988 and joined Czechoslovak Television Ostrava as a music dramaturge. In June 1989 he signed Several Sentences and subsequently lost his job. After the revolution he returned to television, but soon began to pursue his dream of living in the USA. In 1991, he went to Salt Lake City with a hundred dollars in his pocket to visit friends and earn money by doing various unqualified jobs. When the horrific massacre at Columbine High School near Denver took place in 1999, he weas working for a CNN crew as a driver and offered his suggestions on how to report the tragedy. He was given the chance, and two months later he moved to CNN headquarters in Atlanta, where he worked as foreign news editor. He also covered the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. In 2002, he went to Afghanistan for the first time as a war correspondent. He has reported from every conceivable crisis area: Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Haiti and many others. In 2007, he quit his job at CNN and moved to Beijing. There he worked as a foreign correspondent for Czech Television in China. In 2014, he returned to Europe and began lecturing for a living. He has written two books and made a feature-length documentary, Heaven. In 2021 he was living in Prague.