"Our activities, which were cultural, basically we just met, we tried to make some samizdat, but that was only two issues, really more cultural. But there was one problem, when I was about eighteen, I don't know exactly, a teacher confiscated my notebook lying on the school desk. That was a problem. There I had various, well, combinations of, like little pieces of sickle and hammer with a swastika. And lists, like Charlie Soukup, things like that. The notebook disappeared, then something happened around, it was a bit mysterious, the cops turned up and so on. It was only actually years later that one of my classmates admitted that they had been interrogated by State Security and that they had asked about me. If I was saying something, if I was spreading something and so on. At the end of my studies, I learned from the headmaster of the school that he no longer had the notebook and that he couldn't give it back to me because he had handed it in. 'You know where, but if you say it somewhere, I'll deny it.' That's literally how he told me."
"Then, for example, when I was sixteen or seventeen, actually through our friends, there was another family that was very close, Josef Dvořák's family. My father's pupil from that year 1948. And this Josef Dvořák was involved as a student, actually the initiator, in a leafleting action at the Chotěboř grammar school. Jan Zábrana recalls this in his Diaries. He wasn't arrested for it, but he spent an unpleasant time in State Security custody, was expelled from school, Auxiliary Engineering Corpses. Then he worked in a factory, finally after 1968 he got into the forest as a forest worker. And this was an evangelical family, and thanks to them I was around evangelicals as a teenager. I used to go to Jimramov, there were Chartist ministers like Vojen Syrovátka. And there I met Jirka Simsa, who was the son of Jan Šimsa, our fathers were behidn bars together. So it was connecting and that suited me much more, better. But then I came back again."
"He was greatly strengthened by the publication of Charter 77. In his archive there is a very extensive subscription to Charter 77, a signature of the Charter, which he apparently did not send. I don't know, I never had a chance to talk to him about it, but he just had a problem, as did a number of people who were connected with 1948 and were on the other side. Now they had the problem that a significant number of the Chartists were former, now reform communists. That, I think, was probably the main reason. But the strange thing is that although he was so active, he was never in a group or associated with anybody, part of an environment. He maintained a number of contacts, a number of people visited him, he was very active himself. It was a different time then, no problem if he came somewhere, went and visited a personality, perhaps a cultural personality or someone he respected, someone he was interested in, without announcement, without an appointment. That way he behaved normally. But that he had a circle with whom he would, for example, plan a joint procedure, that never happened. He was a total individualist in this."
Prokop Tomek was born on 1 February 1965, grew up in Chotěboř, in a family with five children. His father’s attitude towards the communist regime greatly influenced his childhood. His father, Oldřich Tomek, graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University, majoring in philosophy - history, between 1945 and 1948, but he spent his entire professional life in Chotěboř, where he was alternately a teacher and a worker in the working professions. He was first given a suspended sentence at the beginning of the normalisation period, then in the second half of the 1970s he was given a year’s unconditional sentence under section 100 on sedition, and then a further unconditional sentence for a non-political offence, during which he became deathly ill. Already in his adolescence, Prokop Tomek was acquainted with samizdat and unofficial culture and participated in hidden religious activities. After serving his military service in the railway army, he left for Prague in January 1989, where he became involved in anti-regime demonstrations and other activities. He signed Charter 77 in August 1989, participated in the 17 November 1989 demonstration, where he was beaten and later testified in the investigation. In the 1990s he became heavily involved in the Czech section of Amnesty International and began working at the Office for Documentation and Investigation of Crimes against Communism. While working there, he studied history at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University (FF UK), where he eventually earned his PhD degree. In 2024 he worked at the Military Historical Institute.
From left: brothers Oldřich and Václav, sister Helena, father Oldřich Tomek, mother Marie Tomková and sister Gabriela, in a pram Prokop Tomek, Chotěboř, February 1965
From left: brothers Oldřich and Václav, sister Helena, father Oldřich Tomek, mother Marie Tomková and sister Gabriela, in a pram Prokop Tomek, Chotěboř, February 1965
