Tomáš Molnár

* 1961

  • "I studied, did my exit exams and that same day I went and ended my job with the Central Bohemia Printing Works and I was unemployed for the next six weeks. But I already knew exactly what I wanted to do. When I was went to school at Senovážné Square there was a secondhand bookstore on Dlážděná Street, the next street over. I really liked it a lot, and I really wanted to work in a secondhand bookstore. What I liked most was when I went there and one of the employees was sitting on a chair with his feet on the desk, I was fascinated by this, I told myself: ‘I want to work here.’ Later I found out that the reason he had his feet on the table was because he had some issue with inflamed veins. And working there was really exceptional, the pressure that communism put on the place was huge. The impetus at first was that I liked it there, that someone there could have their feet on the table. There was a staffer, it’s a paradox, who was an evangelical who had a little recreational house in Polabí and on the weekends he was an evangelical there and during the week he was a staffer of the state company Kniha Praha. It’s kind of unreal, he was the director of the human resources division of a state company. In any case, it was this man who helped me get the job at the secondhand bookstore on Dlážděná Street, which was a wonderful time for me, and I stayed there for seven years. I got to know a bunch of excellent people who have remained my close acquaintances till today, if they haven’t passed away already. The intellectual elite of this country used to go there, those who then were all forced into the same corner. Who to mention first? The poet Zbyněk Hejda worked there, Karol Sidon, Vlasta Třešňák. Mr. Kemr went there, very regularly, tons of artists such as Karel Nepraš, Aleš Veselý, and so on, the list could go on and on forever. It really was a beautiful time, I was unbelievably happy there. It was seven years which were very definitive for me. When it comes to my education, I did my entrance tests there, learned library sciences, and subsequently I completed a distance learning program at the Secondary and Vocational School of Library Sciences at Vítězná Pláň. Five years later I ceremoniously finished my vocational school, which was something I had longed for, getting that diploma and graduating.”

  • “During that time we started to hang out with different long-hairs from Lysá, we went to the bar Vinná Réva, but we had a rule that we didn’t drink any alcohol. When we went there we didn’t bring the barman any business because just drank raspberry lemonade which made him angry, it wasn’t too kind to him. The other way around: we felt inside that we had to save the other long-hairs who were getting drunk. So we started trying to coax them into going to church – and successfully. In any case, it brought us attention. Even if that attention was only secondary. The first thing was one of our friends, Jenda Šenků, had an Aero at home and then another guy everyone called ‘Satan,’ I don’t know why, had an Aero at home too. And Jenda Šenků wanted to give him some parts from his Aero so we loaded them into his Wartburg and took them to Satan, where we loaded them onto the sidewalk, rang his doorbell, and gave them to him. Someone saw us and because some cars in the area had been stolen at the time, someone reported us and the police came. They were normal cops, it was all clear that it was a mistake, but we said something during the investigation that caught the ears of the StB, that we did were doing something else, something murky, instead of stealing a car. So they started watching us and we ended up getting arrested and investigated over and over because they thought we were an anti-government cell. Once they came at four in the morning, pulled us out bed and then we came back home at six in the evening, different police officers took turns with us, one was the nice, the other mean, classic. One made threats; the third sucked up to us, the baloney they came up with was marvelous. It even turned out that in ’78 or ’79, I was already eighteen then, three guys ended up collaborating, but then there was amnesty and that amnesty freed them of it.”

  • “The three of us became really close friends [they pretended to be the Rychlé šípy (Quick Darts) – the heroes of Foglar’s books], we had a clubhouse at home in the parsonage on the veranda. We wrote a diary, a chronicle of those Quick Darts. Then there were the enemies – the Mažnáks and the Brotherhood of the Cat Paws – and these were clearly defined. There were three of us siblings, our parents were at the parent teacher conference for my sister but they didn’t make it to mine in time, then they went to meet my teacher outside of the ordinary parents association and we found out later that at that parents association my teacher was speaking, and, in terms of the normalization period, she was more diligent, dedicated than normalization called for, and she said that it was inappropriate for the other children to be friends with me because I was the son of a pastor, a class-enemy of society. And for the parents [of my classmates] to follow suit. So the parents really did follow suit and it was in this way that after the year 1969 I lost all of the normal friends that a kid has. Červenáček even came and took our chronicle. Everyone was being so petty; he took the chronicle and gave it the Brotherhood of the Cat Paws. One boy, who was a bit more brutal, maybe today he’s a fine guy, I can’t say, he read it aloud in a mocking way in class and then tore it to pieces. The effort to somehow justify it was dumb, zealous; the parents probably played a part in it too. So I really didn’t have any friends for many years and what saved me was having this big garden where one can engage in a bunch of awesome things even without the warm presence of human contact.”

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Jíčín, 21.09.2014

    (audio)
    duration: 01:17:07
    media recorded in project Soutěž Příběhy 20. století
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

A rebel forever

Tomáš Molnár in 1983
Tomáš Molnár in 1983
photo: soutěž

Tomáš Molnár was born on 31 January 1961. His father Dalibor Molnár was an evangelical pastor in Lysá nad Labem. His mother, a trained nurse, took care of Tomáš’s older disabled brother, Štěpán. His sister Renata became a deaconess. The entire family ran the farm at the parsonage. As the son of a pastor he was somewhat excluded from the collective during primary school and was not recommended to continue his studies at lyceum. He studied and trained as a typesetter. During his studies in Prague he become involved with the then underground movement and found himself under watch by the StB. After completing his apprenticeship, he started working at the famed Prague secondhand bookstore on Dlážděná Street. He completed library sciences at the secondary/college level in a distance studies program, which he completed and graduated from. He was active in the underground music group Žabí Hlen (Frog Phlegm). At the end of the 1980s he started studying theology. He became an evangelical pastor and till today he functions at the parsonage in Trutnov. He continues to be an active musician.