“I completely forgot the fact that it was a kind of German hotel and walked through the courtyard. I crawled closed to the house, then I looked back and saw several barrels protruding from each of the windows. But I walked so close to the wall they they did not even notice me.”
“The improvement of the microscope consisted in that that only a very thin part of the object was made visible and enlarges. Everything that was above and below was not seen and could not, therefore, interfere with the picture focused. This was the first time that the level which was clearly visible could be observed and what would have been blurred was simply erased. It was not allowed in the picture. This was the whole thing.”
“When I was walking along the tram tracks U Bulhara towards the Žižkov tunnel, a man shot into stomach fell down. We happened to walk by, so we took him up and carried him into a house where he was likely to die, as there was no help at the ready. And this was how I made my way into a picture book on the Prague Uprising.”
“The war was coming to an end, and then they bombed the Kbely factory. Sadly, there were about seventy dead. People, instead of running into the shelter, ran into the fields. And in the fields, there were several hundred of German planes flown in from the front. And many small bombs fell on the fields. There were dozens of workers from the factory hidden in the fields, so many of them died there. And we buried them. It took us about three days. We were given spirits and cigarettes to be able to cope.”
“There is such a nice house with an arch on the crossroads down to Libeň. I climbed to the attic with a machine gun and from there I was shooting at the Na Pražačce school, occupied then by a German garrison. I shot a few rounds and then they hit the roof on the roof above with a cannon. So we stopped and ran. We broke the machine gun and the gunsmiths refused to repair it, saying it was German and that they didn’t know it. So a Prague tram driver repaired it.”
“And it was really funny when once [my colleague Vystrčko] arrived at a meeting of a resistance organisation he was not supposed to know about but he did. And he said: ‘I have a wagon full of guns at the Vršovice station! Do you want them? But you would have to come with a truck, I cannot let you in one by one.’ Well, we immediately started thinking where to get a truck and, naturally, we did not succeed. And then Mirek says, ‘You know, the guns don’t have breeches.’ It was a strategy of the Germans when they sent such transports over the railroad, they sent guns and machine guns one way and some important parts, such as breeches, another way — and it met at the destination. His offer, therefore, was useless. But Vystrčko said, ‘Shall we leave the guns to the Germans, then?’ I should not repeat what my friends told him… But he eventually sold it that he took the guns one by one, put the barrel in between the doors, put a pressure on the rifle but and bent the barrel slightly. So the guns were, eventually, like Buffalo Bill’s guns who, as we know, could shoot behind the corner.”
“I even was a member of their party. I started working closely with the communists already during the war. This was, however, something quite different from later, namely after 1968. Then they dealt with me rather speedily. And no wonder. It was in fact a relief for me.”
Mojmír Petráň was born on March 28, 1923, in Prague-Žižkov. This is where he attended about three primary schools before joining the grammar school in Dvořákova street where he passed his school-leaving exam in 1942. It was at this time when a school-mate introduced him to an illegal organisation Movement for Freedom. Already as a student, he was much interested in physics and shortly after he made his first attempts as an amateur radio operator. He thus started to build, secretly, receives for foreign broadcast. Until 1945 he worked in the Kbely factory near Prague, where communication devices for the Wehrmacht were manufactured. After the war he engaged as a campaigner and later an official of the Youth Union. He directly witnessed the bombing of the above mentioned factory in Kbely, as well as the air raid on the Karlovo Square hospital. He took active part in May Uprising fights. At the end of the war, he was one of those who welcomed the Red Army. In summer 1945 he started studying medicine. He even became the social officer of the Association of University Students. He graduated in 1950 and married for the first time. He also went for his military service. Later he was employed as a fellow in the Physiological Institute of the Academy of Sciences and soon reached notoriety with his important book Electro-physiological Methods in Biological Research. In 1960, he moved to Pilsen, where he got a position at the Department of Biophysics. His important book opened for him a way to the United States, where he spent four months at Yale Universirty, Connecticut. In Pilsen, he was also on the Communist Party Committee. In 1964 he invented a patent on improvement of a microscope examining processes in a living body. In 1989 he married for the third time. In the 1990s he taught foreign students in Marienbad. He lived with his third and last wife in Plzeň, Roudná, translated poetry and theoretical books from Latin. Mojmír Petráň died on August 13, 2022.
