"I was really scared. I remember they left me sitting by an open window and was getting cold, having been warmed up with work earlier. I started shivering a little bit. It took a long time. They took turns being there with me. I was looking around for something to do, I basically got the idiotic idea that I could get out of there. When even the other investigator went out the door to talk, I looked around and saw that there was a long phone cord, it was the first floor, and maybe I could get out and escape using the phone cord. It would probably have turned out all wrong, so I quickly dismissed it. The breaks in the interrogation were quite short."
"There were rows of people shaking their fists and cursing the occupiers. All of a sudden, there was a gap in the column and a GAZ was driving within it. It slowed down and a weird old guy jumped off. Sharp features, a paratrooper's beret to the side and an armful of flowers. You could see what he was going for: propaganda. More soldiers drive by soon, and he was throwing them flowers. Just as he began doing it, my friend and especially my brother's friend Franta 'Pery' Šída jumped in. He was never a brawler or an edgy man. We were standing in the third row or so of the pack, he made his way through the people to this paratrooper, and gave him such a worker's slap that his beret flew off and the flowers scattered."
"I don't know if he found out about Smítka but he certainly knew that the Chlum boys, the brothers, were dead. See, they were poor people, and their mum made them shirts out bed linen with some patterns on it. Nobody else had shirts like that. One day, when they were running my dad to work outside, and he saw their clothes stashed up in front of the cell. That's how it worked there. The shirts were on top, neatly stashed. They'd undress them there, then they'd run them out into the yard and shoot them. That's where Dad spent the worst nights of his life. He came home after work... sick... and he knew these friends weren't there anymore. So, he could assume that Joska was gone too."
Vladimír ‘Chafer’ Procházka was born in Turnov on 18 August 1948. His father Vladimír, nicknamed Chafer the First (1918), grew up with his aunts in Turnov, where he started climbing in the 1930s with Ladislav ‘Fifan’ Vodháněl and Josef ‘Joska’ Smítka. At the end of the war the group ended up in the Small Fortress in Terezín. The witness’s father was the only to survive the war. The Procházkas moved from Turnov to Liberec in 1954. Vladimír Jr worked in a lab at Textilana following school before going to university in Pardubice where he stayed for one year. On 21 August 1968, he and his friend František ‘Pery’ Šída were in Liberec, witnessing the shooting in the square in front of the town hall. After the riots of 21 August 1969, the State Security (StB) suspected him of being the author of the giant inscription ‘Husák is an asshole’ that appeared on the Textilana chimney. He was interrogated about it. He then trained for a printer. Worked at Severografia, and then at a printing house belonging to the Družba cooperative from 1976 until the 1990s. His brother Jan, two years younger, died tragically in 1973 climbing in Norway. The witness and wife Květa, née Zástěrová, have two sons - Marek and Dan. In 2024 he lived again in his native Turnov where he moved in 2006.
Scouts in the Turnov square in a photo by chronicler Viktor Tomek. From left: Vojta Nejedlo, Vladimír "Chafer" Procházka Sr, Josef Smítka and Ladislav Vodháněl, 1936 or 1937
Scouts in the Turnov square in a photo by chronicler Viktor Tomek. From left: Vojta Nejedlo, Vladimír "Chafer" Procházka Sr, Josef Smítka and Ladislav Vodháněl, 1936 or 1937
