“Back in the days of the war, radio sets didn’t have short waves because there was an ordinance banning short waves in radios, because London broadcast on short waves. They had to be handed in to some shop, where they took the short waves out and then gave you the radio back. Well, and Špála [a renowned Czech painter - trans.] was so sorry that he couldn’t listen any more, and I was something of a DIY electrician, so I went and made a short-wave coil with a kind of connector, and we tried to install it in the radio so he could listen [to the London broadcast]. He was awfully happy, he always took it out and hid it in his drawer so that everything would be okay. He said he had to return me the favour somehow, so he gave me a little picture of lily of the valleys. So I’ve got a picture of lily of the valleys from Venca Špála for enabling him to listen to the radio.”
“Well, and in that year forty-five I had some pretty bad luck because on 7 May, when Prague was already being liberated, the Germans managed to get one plane, allegedly from Hradec Králové, to drop a bomb on the Radio House, to stop the broadcast, but the bomb didn’t hit the Radio, it hit the house I lived in. So I was trapped in the debris, but because they’d made tunnels that connected the houses, they soon got to me from the neighbouring house. I had a lot of trouble with my eyes, I spent three weeks in an eye clinic, and then in the neurology ward, but all in all I recovered pretty well from that unpleasant bombing. Mum, she was in a worse state, she lost her eye due to that air raid.”
“I still feel to be a Scout, and that’s because when I took my oath in front of the others back then, I took it seriously and not as something that goes in on one side and comes right out on the other. My whole life I have tried to live according to the Scout oath. That is, I feel, important. I reckon that if there were more Scouts and they kept to the oath, there wouldn’t be so much trouble, so many people who attack other people, who run someone over in their car and then drive off, don’t help them... Those are the dregs of society, I’m sure those people weren’t Scouts. So that’s what I always wish, that there would be more Scouts in our country.”
“The third camp was a somewhat sorrowful affair in a way, because we’d already built the camp, and within two or three days a gendarme came along, he was holding a paper that said the Scouts Movement was dissolved and that we had to take the camp apart within a few days. So we only spent a few days at that camp. We had one raft there, it was pretty big, so we could all ride on it. We told each other it wouldn’t end like that. We had the raft sent by train to Suchdol, so after that we rode the River Lužnice and Vltava, not as Scouts, but as civilians.”
Full recordings
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klubovna 18.střediska KRUH, Dejvická 2, Praha 6, 03.04.2014
Jan Ivo Tomáš was born on 22 January 1922. Before the war he lived in Prague-Vinohrady. In the early 1930s his affiliation with the Rotary Club led him and his friend Felix Kolmer to join the Scouts Movement, and a few years later they co-led camps of the 18th Troop in Dejvice. During the war he worked as an electrician at Philips. On 8 May 1945 he was seriously wounded when the Germans hit the house he lived in when trying to bomb the Czechoslovak Radio. After spending three months recovering he decided to complete the university studies the Germans had barred him from undertaking; he managed get by with just a few weeks of compulsory military service. He also met with his friend Felix, who returned from Auschwitz in May. Together, they worked at the Department of Acoustics at the Research Institute in Prague until their retirement.
