“Sometime late in the evening my class teacher Žofie Borská rang at the door. She was holding a piece of paper in her hand and she asked Mum: ‘What sort of awful document is this?’ And Mum replied that it’s my baptism certificate. Because it contained, as was the custom, the employment of both parents and grandparents. So it said there: father industrialist, godfather wholesaler. To which Žofie told Mum that with such terrible document I wouldn’t even qualify for a miner, and that if I want to go to technical school, Mum should burn that awful piece of paper and get me a normal birth certificate, and then she can recommend me. Mum didn’t burn my baptism certificate, but she claimed it had been lost and she obtained a birth certificate, which contained no mention of my class background.”
“Mum had lots of stories like that because she solved everything directly, face to face, to everyone’s horror. When both my sisters emigrated to the US in 1965, they didn’t tell Mum about it. That was, you could say, a bit of a breach of faith because they could have told Mum everything and she would’ve helped them. But they did it the way they did. So Mum set off to Bartholomew Street [the location of the infamous State Security headquarters - trans.] to report that her daughters had emigrated. She did it straight away. She reported the whole matter to them. The next day at work at the Vltava River Works I dejectedly reported that my sisters had emigrated. The director was scared, his name was Ing. Kupec, he only said it was dreadful, and he asked what we should do about it. I said, nothing, because Mum had already reported it at Bartholomew Street. He immediately wanted to know what they’d told her. So I said that if someone was to give me trouble at work, that Mum was supposed to report that straight away. And that was the end of it. He was terrified, but nothing happened. Mum taught me that, she was really brave. She passed that on to me, and I discovered it’s an important thing in life. Simply, rather than being afraid, go into the problem head first, and more often than not it worked out for us.”
“We went on a trip to Russia with Čedok [a nationwide travel agency - trans.]. So we were in the Soviet Union in June 1968, and I have to tell you that although I consider myself an optimist, I came back from that trip dejected. I kept repeating to myself: ‘I’d attack us.’ They were so fanaticised that when we went somewhere by taxi, for example, and the driver found out we were Czechs, he stopped and told us to get out, because his father had died to liberate us, and now we’re starting up that counter-revolution. So it was obvious what was going on. And right until that 21 August I just kept repeating that one sentence: ‘I’d attack us.’”
Josef Podzimek was born on 28 May 1937 in Brno as the youngest child of the very successful builder Jaroslav Podzimek. After World War II, when the Scouting Movement was renewed in Czechoslovakia, Josef became a Scout, and in 1948 he earned the nickname Egil. The Podzimeks’ property was gradually nationalised. His parents divorced, and the witness grew up with his mother, his sisters, and their former maidservant in Prague, his mother earned the family’s keep doing manual labour. Thanks to his class teacher at primary school, in 1952 he successfully applied to study water management at the Upper Technical School, despite his unfavourable background profile. He was fascinated by his chosen subject, and so he continued to study water management at university (Czech Technical University, Faculty of Civil Engineering). In 1962 he began working as a technician at Labe-Vltava (a company that managed the two biggest Czech rivers, also known according to their German names Elbe and Moldau). After three years he worked himself up to the position of Director of Lower Vltava. When the normalisation began, in 1970, he was removed from his post, but because the waterworks required innovations, he was made head of the department of technical development at the same company. He built up a good team of people, who perfected and innovated the old water management facilities. The department implemented a number of facilities and machines that are in use to this day. In 1989 the whole department was scrapped, and Josef Podzimek left Vltava River Works to fully devote himself to the creation of the Danube-Oder-Elbe waterway in the role of chief executive officer of the joint-stock company Ekotrans Moravia a. s. In 1994 the company gave up trying to create the canal, and Josef Podzimek quit his position. The same year he founded the Water Transportation Fund, which continues to promote this idea and which also publishes the magazine Vodní cesty a plavba (Water Transportation and Voyages). After democracy was renewed in Czechoslovakia he regain the property that the Communists had taken from him and his parents. This also renewed the operations of Podzimek & Sons, which proudly calls itself the oldest Czech family building firm. In 2008 he was awarded the Medal of Merit, 3rd Class.
