Father was taken in for questioning. We never saw him again.
Download image
Tomáš Veselý, nee Weiss, was born on 27 June 1940 in Bratislava to Oskar and Anežka Weiss. His father was Jewish, his mother Catholic. The family observed both Jewish and Christian customs. He spent the war in Stara Tura, Slovakia, where the family had moved from Bratislava so as not to be so visible to the Nazi regime. In Stara Tura he experienced bombing. After the war, the family changed their German-sounding surname. From 1946 the Veselí family lived in Ostrava with their maternal aunt. After primary school, Tomáš Veselý entered the business academy, where he graduated in 1958. Between 1959 and 1961 he served his basic military service in Nitra. A few days after the birth of his first son, his father died in 1963, allegedly during an interrogation by State Security Service (StB). For four years, Tomáš Veselý worked at the rolling mill in Vítkovice Ironworks, where he survived the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops. In protest, he and his colleagues lay down in front of the tanks. In 1969 he married for the second time and moved to Prague to join his newlywed wife. For the next two decades, he worked at the state-owned company Paints and Varnishes. During Palach Week in January 1989, he participated in anti-regime demonstrations in Prague. In 2023 he was living in Prague.
