Viktor Weilguny

* 1946

  • "We started marching from that area, before all the cops got there, down to Královka and down along Královka to the Castle and down Nerudova Street. The cops had already reacted there, they stopped the front guard, now we were squeezed in, we were squeezed in and we didn't know what was happening in front. The ones in front couldn't let us know to turn around. Eventually we got along somehow, and we went up at a steady march, and only then did what I said about the kick-off begin. There was a huge fight, they had batons and there were more and more of them, so we retreated to the individual blocks where we lived and closed the doors behind us. The doors were glass, in metal frames. They from one side, we from the other side, we rolled our eyes at each other. Because they started acting like that, we started shouting, 'Gestapo, Gestapo!' Now they were even more furious, until the door cracked and the glass broke. They chased us down the corridors of those buildings, and we knew it there, and they didn't, they didn't have flashlights and they didn't have things like that, so they got a beating. In the morning we counted on our block that we had captured nine police caps, three batons, a few shoes, etc. We didn't sleep until almost dawn, and waited to see what would happen. Smrkovský [Minister Josef Smrkovský] arrived, and he called us together in a huge canteen that could hold over a thousand people, so we crowded in. Now he was telling us that times would change, to calm down, that everything was yet to come, to be patient. In the meantime, Antonin Novotny and his delegation went to Moscow, I don't know what he said there, if they even knew. For a long time it was spoken of as the Strahov events, this is what I have just told you."

  • "It started with Strahov being completed at the very last minute so that the 1965 Spartakiáda event could take place. Only later did we find out that they had very much saved on the electricity supply cables that distributed the electricity around the blocks, if you know Strahov, there are twelve blocks of rooms. They were always in threes and marked red, blue, green and the twelfth one was grey. There were about six thousand students there. And we paid fot it in 1967, because right from the beginning of the term the electricity started to turn off, the blocks went out, they took different turns, because they interconnected the power lines so that those who didn't have light could have it too, but that put even more strain on the power lines, until at the end of October - the year started on the first of October - the whole Strahov went out. We couldn't work, and in the meantime we were still suffering from lighting candles, many times our drawing burned down when the candle tipped over. At school they didn't ask us if we had finished our work or not, we had a lot of drawing to do on thin paper, there were no computers yet. It was something like the 30th of October, it was the very last days of October... we ran out of patience and set off."

  • "In 1941, my dad, because he had a German mother - but he had a blue book, he was never a soldier because he was the most malnourished of the eleven children - so he was paradoxically drafted into Hitler's army to work in the rear, supplies, clothes, food. And so he even got as far as Moscow, where he saw the Moscow towers, where they were going to attack. Because it was winter, they sent him home on leave. During his leave he was ordered not to go east anymore, but to go west, somewhere near Belgium, in the Benelux places. There were a lot of Czechs there other than him, and there forty men got together and deserted into the hands of the English. They held them for some time before they were taken to Britain, where they were all checked out. I don't know if they taught all of them, or just my father and his friend, a countryman, how to drive a lorry, and put them as drivers with a co-driver in the UNRRA group, which was to supply food to the population after the Allied landings, to look after them in situations where the Germans had already been driven out. So he made it all the way to Prague."

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    Karlovy Vary, 06.03.2023

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As a student, he protested about the darkness in university dormitories, only to get hit with a baton

Viktor Weilguny in 1966
Viktor Weilguny in 1966
photo: Witness´s archive

Viktor Weilguny was born on 26 December 1946 in Cheb. His father served in the Wehrmacht during World War II, first on the Eastern Front, then in the West. Together with other Czechs, they defected to the English. His father then worked as a driver for the UNRRA and made it all the way to Prague. His first wife died on 8 May 1945 during the Soviet air raid on Teplice. Father remarried after the war and worked as a shoe merchant, first in Cheb and then in Karlovy Vary, where the family lived in the Baťa department store. As a student of the Czech Technical University, the witness participated in the protest at Strahov dormitories on 31 October 1967. In August 1968, despite the occupation, he decided to return from his stay in West Germany. After graduation, he worked in the construction industry and also as a teacher at a secondary industrial school. In 2023, he was living in Karlovy Vary and still earned his living as a designer and forensic expert.