Tomáš Plichta

* 1947

  • “I kind of distrusted the man as I was wondering why he would let them ruin his life, why is he willing to go to prison and do other things he surely didn´t wanted to. That man has to be worth something, I thought. And as I watched him on TV visiting the U.S. Senate, the Congress, and those people would rise several times and applaud him, I thought they had to have a high regard for the man, that he must have captured their attention somehow. That there has to be something we didn´t encounter.”

  • “I won´t forget that as I came amongst the searchers, they would show me the blades, it was like – imagine a shop window – with these squares maybe this big. And they would give you an oil pencil and a cloth; and you would hold the pencil between these two fingers and you would write. But you had to do a mirror image. And after you had covered the whole blade with writing you had to sweep it off and start again. And on next day, the same thing. That´s how you learned to write. And as I said, there were these squares, the so-called State Air Defence network. An imaginary network 4 x 4 kilometres wide. And they would communicate by the means of numbers only. So from 8 AM to 11PM or even to 1AM, we would sit in the lecture room and memorise these signals, the codes. And you would have maybe eighty coded symbols, and there were even more. For example, you would report 004152775491047 to identify the target, the position of the plane. And you had to repeat it twice, and we had to be able to process maybe sixteen codes per minute. So when they would send us to do the scrubbing, the cleaning, with brushes and so, it was like a reward.”

  • “On August 21st I was still a soldier, at home on leave. On Tuesday, we were sitting at the club, me and Jirka Sajbrt, we would order a bottle of wine, drink it and at maybe at half past ten in the evening we would go home. At five o clock in the morning, my older brother who just came from Topolná woke me up, saying, “You are sleeping here while we are being taken by the Russians.” And I thought, what to do now? What should a soldier on leave do in such a situation? And after I said goodbye to my family, my father told me: “Maybe you will be deployed somewhere, maybe you would have to shoot people. Remember they are Czech, and just shoot into the air, if your survival wouldn´t depend on it!”

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    Hulín, 31.08.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 02:24:06
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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My father was telling me: Remember they are Czech, and just shoot into the air if your survival wouldn´t depend on it

Tomáš Plichta as a fifteen-years-old
Tomáš Plichta as a fifteen-years-old
photo: archiv pamětníka

Tomáš Plichta was born on January 4th of 1947 in Uherské Hradiště to Stanislav and Marie né Nesrstová. He and his three brothers were growing up in a family involved in bakery business started by his grandfather who came to Napajedla from Třebíčsko in 1905. In 1953, as Tomáš was six years old, his father had to give up his business. After that, he was employed at bakeries at Otrokovice and Prštné. Also, the family sustained itself by growing vegetables as they had a large garden in Napajedla. After completing the elementary education, he had been serving his apprenticeship in Fatra Napajedla becoming an electromechanical technician. Since his early age he was an avid football player. In 1966, he began his compulsory military service in Brno-Řečkovice. After being trained as a signaller, he replaced another soldier in National air defence unit, where he served as an operator and later as so-called “reader”. Shortly before the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, he spent several months of his mandatory service in the Soviet Union. After leaving the army in September 1968, he resumed his job at Fatra Napajedla enterprise where he had been working in the measuring machinery department since completing his apprenticeship. In 1990, he left Fatra and began working as a councillor at the Napajedla Town Hall. He spent sixteen years in politics – six years as the major of Napajedla. Today, he is a retiree.