"It was really a few days that I will not forget, with a single program - one went, contacted acquaintances, traffic was interrupted in most of Prague, so I went on foot all the way to Dejvice. And I can tell you, I went to Dejvice, I often shortened it, I went through the Prague Castle. And this time it was strange to me on the Lesser Town Square there was no one at the Castle Stairs. So, however, I went upstairs and only when I was almost at the level of Hradčanské náměstí did I understand why. Suddenly, at the top of the horizon, on the steps, two soldiers, about twenty meters above me, pointed a submachine gun at me and said, 'Put on your back!' So, I would disappear. Well, you can't imagine what it is. A soldier of a foreign nationality will prevent you from entering any symbol of Czech statehood. So it was bad. I don't like to remember it, but it was the way it was."
"Well, I get to that on December 5, 1989. They invited us all to the embassy, including me, that there would be important news on Czechoslovak Radio. So I went, I said what could happen to me. So I went there and they just announced that the regime was falling, that President Husak had decided to abdicate on December 10, and that there would be a presidential election. They already knew that it would take place on December 29, the end of the year, and that the only candidate for president was Václav Havel. And I want to talk about this moment. The whole embassy was there. They were people, there was a lot of protection at the time, some of them did nothing there, some did very little. They didn't even know the Portuguese, they didn't know English, they didn't know the languages. The son of the then Minister of the Interior and his wife were employed there. She was a beautiful woman, such a pretty woman, I don't know, in her thirties, and I experienced that interesting moment, how a beautiful woman can disgust in a second. When they announced that Václav Havel would be the only candidate, the woman had a hysterical fit, twisted her face and started shouting: 'No, no, no, no!' over it... that it's just given, that they've already decided, that's how everyone understood it. And she understood again that her good position there at the embassy was ending, her world had collapsed."
"I went to Austria in 1969 to emigrate. I didn't like it here anymore. I was already a forest engineer, I worked for Lesprojekt and I lived in Prague. I went to Austria, but I was unlucky. It was Easter 1969 and about ten thousand young Czechs and Slovaks had the same idea as me. They arrived in Vienna and formed queues in front of them, there were three places to sign up, and a queue of several hundred meters in each line. I've hated queues since I was young, so I refused to join. I spent ten days there and left - an unsuccessful emigration."
Karel Rokyta was born on January 28, 1943 in Jasenná in Eastern Moravia. My father worked as a forester and passed on his love of nature to Charles. In 1949, Karel entered the first grade, and in 1960 he graduated from the eleven-year High School in Vizovice. He wanted to study law, but as a village boy he was only allowed to study at agricultural colleges. Through a small scam, he managed to get to the Faculty of Forestry at the University of Agriculture in Brno, which he successfully graduated from five years later. In 1965 he spent a year in the military service in Šumava with the tank regiment. Then he started working as a taxpayer for Lesprojekt, the Institute for Forest Management. In the forest near Blatná, the news of the occupation of the country by Warsaw Pact troops reached him. At that time, he lived in Prague, where he immediately went with a colleague. He witnessed the liquidation of tanks and the subsequent shooting in front of Czechoslovak Radio; he also encountered soldiers with machine guns in Hradčany. As a result of political events, he decided to emigrate through Austria in 1969, but a number of people who had the same idea and completely paralyzed the embassy in Vienna discouraged him. In the 1970s, he began his postgraduate studies and learned Spanish and Portuguese. His first business trip to Peru was thwarted by a coup d’état in 1979, and three years later he went to Angola for a year, from where he was driven out by the Civil War. In 1985, he went to Mozambique for two years, where he returned from 1989 to 1995 as a teacher at the local forestry faculty. He experienced the Velvet Revolution at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Maputo and returned to the independent Czech Republic. Upon his return, he married and began lecturing at the Agricultural University in Suchdol, briefly also at the University of Brno, and between 2005 and 2015 he taught at the Secondary Agricultural School in Brandýs nad Labem. He returned to Africa several more times for brief examinations, most recently in 2015 to Cape Verde. In 2021 he lived in Brandýs nad Labem. Karel Rokyta passed away on July, the 14th, 2024.
