Tomáš Veselý

* 1940

  • "They were just always looking for something, whether we had, I don't know, some foreign goods at home, or, I don't know, well, to tell you the truth, I don't know." - "What did it look like?" - "Mum drove us to one room, we had a three, one room, and they just came in there like in the army the old hands, they used to throw things out like those greenhorns like that all the time, they never found anything, I mean like." - "And who was that? Was it the State Security?" - "State Security." - "And when was that, how old were you? How big were you?" - "Well, I basically remember things after I was. That's when I was twenty-three. My first son was born. And on Friday, on Friday State Security came to investigate him [the father]. And we never saw my father again. He was fifty-three years old, and he died during the investigation."

  • "When the bombing was on, we were hidden in the mill, that was in 1944. That's when I remember that even a few bombs fell on the mill, but because the bombs were made, I think, in Martinov and they didn't have the primer or the fuse, so it just did material damage, not explosive damage."

  • "It was a family, Alexander Valenta was his name, the mother, I don't know what her name was, or the lady, I don't know. There were more people hidden there. A Catholic priest, Alfons Ščepko, took care of us as a family. I remember that well, because after the war in 1954 we met together, he came to visit us afterwards. We had to move to Ostrava because our apartment, the owner of the apartment died, or rather the family house, and the apartment was occupied by a Czech tenant. And we didn't show, even all the furniture was moved out, so my aunt accommodated us in Ostrava, where she had one vacant apartment, and we lived de facto in Ostrava from 1946."

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    Praha, 13.06.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:37:44
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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Father was taken in for questioning. We never saw him again.

Tomas Vesely, circa 1958
Tomas Vesely, circa 1958
photo: Archive of the witness

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.