“When I was going by train from Libuň to the higher elementary school, I had to go through the forest, carrying a lantern, and it was about one and a half kilometres, and then we went several train stops by train and then in Železnice... it is interesting that the train station is quite far from the town, so we would have to walk again and from 1945, as the war front was approaching, the people from the territories conquered by the Red Army were escaping to the west, and some of them stopped in our schoolhouse where we normally went to school and so we were then going there only to get our homework. We were being given the assignments in pubs, where they would tell us what to study and what homework to prepare and we were then allowed to return to our school building only in May.”
“We had a cable radio and we learnt it from there, and so I called Tonda, the head of the Brno editor’s office, and he replied that this was hell of a mess, and so we went to the editor’s room which had not been occupied and the telephones were not working, but the teletype was functioning. And we learnt from the radio that the Czech Press Office in Prague had been taken over and that they were now working from the office of the Agricultural Newspaper and they told us to send the news from Brno by phone to them.”
“They were deported, because although my aunt’s maiden name was Gusta Semeráková, she was born in Tratenau, which became part of the German Reich after 1939, and it took them a long time before the authorities gave her permission to marry a Czech. We thus lived in the house of my father’s parents until 1938 and we finished the construction of our house at that time. And since my brother was born in 1938, and then my sister, my uncle in Jaroměř, where they had deported him, told me that they would let me stay with them for several months. My uncle was thus carrying me in a buggy through the Grandmother’s Valley. And tradesmen were gathering there and eventually they allowed them to marry.”
Bohumil Hlaváček was born on September 14, 1934 in Pařezská Lhota. He comes from a poor family and both his parents were employed as workers. Bohumil had a total of eleven siblings. He learnt the optician’s trade, but he was interested in working as a journalist and already as a young man he was contributing to some periodicals. When he was seventeen years old, he became a correspondent for the Liberec edition of the Mladá Fronta newspaper. In order to be able to become a member of the editorial staff, he had to gain some experience with manual labour as well. He thus participated on the construction of the New Ironworks of Klement Gottwald in Ostrava, he was helping to build rail tracks leading to the blast furnace and he worked on the construction of concrete foundations of furnaces in the steelworks. He joined the Czech Press Office in 1953 after a one-year work for the daily “Den” in Ostrava -Kunčice.While working for the Czech Press Office, he also briefly served in their regional departments in Ostrava and Zlín and then from 1957 until 1999 he was working in Brno. His work as a journalist is recorded in tens of thousands of news articles in the archive of the Czech Press Office. He focused mainly on culture and agriculture. Simultaneously with his job he also managed to complete studies at the Law Faculty of Charles University in Prague and to defend his thesis there. The thesis titled “Press Correction” was not allowed to be published due to the events in 1968 and it was banned for many years after. Among other, Bohumil also cooperated with organizers of the International Folklore Festival in Strážnice. He received a number of awards for his work as a journalist, including the Brno City Prize in 2007 and the extraordinary award of the editor-in-chief of the Czech Press Office for his lifelong work. In 2017 he was decorated with the South Moravia Region Prize. He received the Ferdinand Boura Prize for his contribution to journalism and an extraordinary award for his lifelong work for the Czech Press Office. He died on November 30, 2020.
