“I have documents in my possession showing that until March 1990, the army had still been dealing with this – these documents exist, as I have got them – documents showing that the army wanted to reverse the course the country was heading. Until March. So the army and Vacek would swear allegiance to Havel and so on, so Havel thought he had things under control, but he didn´t.”
“After rejoining the army after 1990, I found this document in my personal file at the District Military Administration in Hradec Králové – that I was “included in the Operation Norbert”, as they called it. And the Operation Norbert was an action which still hasn´t been studied thoroughly – and I made this panel on it for the exhibition – and it was like there were five people gathered at the District Military Administration, who decided to include, say, this Franta Vopršálek, in the Operation Norbert. Which meant in case of some extraordinary development in the country, these people – about ten thousand of them – would be gathered and put into an internment camp. The closet internment camp had been in the village of Svářeč (sic!) in Žďár nad Sázavou. That´s right. No one knows how the people would be – God forbid - treated there. But it would be worse than what the Germans had done.”
“In 1968, I was serving in the tank regiment based in Čáslav, and of course, at midnight, our commander had us summoned and told us what was happening. And everyone would react in his distinctive manner, of course. And I would condemn the entry of the allied forces. So later, during the political screenings in 1969, I didn´t qualify. As they would rank my performance in terms of political awareness as unsatisfactory one. I had been ranked as excellent to very good in terms of technical knowledge, but that didn´t matter. So in 1971, I had to leave the army.”
Col. Josef Musil was born on November 14th 1940 in Vápenný Podol. After doing his compulsory military service, he graduated from military school in Vyškov and had been working as a professional soldier. As a tank man, he had been serving in Prachatice, České Budějovice and Čáslav. After the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, he has been condemning the occupation. He didn´t pass the ideological screenings of the ‘normalisation’ period and he had to leave the army in 1971. He had been barred from further studies and had been persecuted while working civilian jobs. After 1989, he has been rehabilitated and rejoined the army, achieving the position of the secretary of the Deputy Defense Minister. He initiated an exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the August invasion, covering the activities in which the army had been involved after 1968. In 2019, Josef Musil was a retiree, living in Havlíčkův Brod. Died on 19th February 2021.
