"It began, 'Comrades, with clenched fists, and comrades, let´s go,' that was the walk I did, 'under the red banner,' I don't remember how I represented red, 'to the teachings of the great Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, under the wise leadership of Antonin Zapotocky, forward to socialism!' And I turned my pocket. So this was a nice joke. Yet by accident, and nobody found out, I forgot Gottwald's way."
"I was not yet interrogated, I was still maturing, so to speak. When it was about 12:30 or a quarter to one, I said I had lunch in the canteen, I would go there. If they wouldn't mind. They said I wouldn't go there, but if I wanted something and I had money on me, I could buy it from them. So I said yes. I got, I don't know if it was a piece of some bread, but it was mainly a piece of twisted salami that had a strange smell. Because I was hungry, I actually ate it. I was waiting to see what was going to happen. At about four o'clock they had just started to interrogate me. The investigating or interrogating authority did not have any bad impression on me. If I had met him on the road, I would have said he was a decent person. He didn't shout at me. He probably wasn't the one with the highest IQ because when he wrote the word Cyril, the surname of one of the boys that I mentioned, he made, if possible, about four or five mistakes in that name. He was always alternating 'i' and 'y', the wrong one or two of the same kind. When I suggested to him if he didn't want to, because he couldn't write very fast either, I couldn't write at all either... if I could write it. He thought about it for a while, but then he said, 'Well, he could come comrade commander.' So nothing came of this 'job' in the end."
"When the Germans came, the German army came from the direction of Hradec [Králové], I don't remember any soldiers marching there. I don't even remember that there were tanks or armored cars. The only memory that sticks with me is that there were soldiers with rifles on their shoulders, but they were riding on bicycles. Because the bicycle, I understood, that's what I was interested in. And when there were these soldiers in a line, not only riding side by side, but behind each other, and there were a lot of them, I would watch that. There, I remember that too, because my grandfather allowed me any allotrium, but here he grabbed me and dragged me away. I was furious. Of course, I didn't know why, but now I guess he didn't want me to wave to the soldiers."
Kamil Hloušek was born on 5 December 1935 in Nový Bydžov, where he spent his childhood and war years with his sisters Maria and Magda. His father Josef worked as a salesman for the Maggi company and his mother Marie ran her parents’ knitting and haberdashery shop. He graduated from the Secondary and Higher Industrial School of Chemistry in Kolín and after a short stint at the East Bohemian Chemical Works in Rybitví he entered the University of Chemical Technology in Pardubice. In the autumn of 1956, he and his classmates listened to news about the Hungarian Revolution and its subsequent bloody suppression by Soviet tanks on foreign radio. Already on 4 November 1956, he was arrested by State Security on the university campus and subsequently sentenced on 1 December 1956 as part of the “anti-state revisionist group of Pavel Levy and Co.” to eight months’ imprisonment (on appeal, the sentence was reduced to five months). In 1963, after many problems, he was allowed to return to his university studies, which he completed in 1969. In 1968, while preparing his thesis, he was poisoned by benzene, which took him out of active chemistry. He worked at the Department of Chemical Thermodynamics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. After moving to Ostrava, he worked, among others, at the Inspectorate of Labour Safety, at the Paskov pulp mill and at the Ecological Institute. After 1989 he started his own business as a designer, especially in the field of groundwater treatment. In 2024 he lived in Ostrava.
Kamil Hloušek in the laboratory of the Institute of Theoretical Foundations of Chemical Techniques, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Prague, 1964-1965
Kamil Hloušek in the laboratory of the Institute of Theoretical Foundations of Chemical Techniques, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Prague, 1964-1965
