Campus Café Hybernská, Hybernská 4, Prague 1
March 15, 2022 at 6 p.m.
We cordially invite you to read from the vivid and witty memoirs of eighty-three-year-old artist, singer and exile Pavel Vošický in the Hybernská Campus Café, where you can also see more than two dozen of Vošický's paintings on display. Free entry.
And then a noisy, battered and sputtering vehicle came from up Crooked Street, with an illegible sign on it, probably in Cyrillic. Out of it stepped two officers in indescribably better uniforms than the previous ones, but wearing rather shabby boots. With some strange mixture of Czech and Russian, they both saluted and asked - as my parents told me afterwards - for the opportunity to spend the night with us, which they did. (...) In the evening they both returned, my father conjured up a bottle from somewhere and both of them enthusiastically accepted the proposal to organize a victory celebration. After a few minutes I was banished from the room and the celebration began. All I heard was some toasts, the clinking of glasses, and then suddenly silence. So I crawled into bed and fell asleep. In the morning, they were both gone, only Dad was unusually groggy and Mom was the same. It wasn't until years later that my parents told me what happened at the kitchen table that day. Surprised parents learned from Russians about life in Russia. I was horrified by their information of what was to come in the future, because in the glorious moments of victory over the Third Reich, a Soviet Land & Sea Aircobra shot down an American Mustang with a white star visible on its wings in front of the terrified Prague citizens. It was truly a harbinger of something to look forward to in the future.
This is an excerpt from a book where Pavel Vošický recalls May 1945 in Prague. What everyone could look forward to is the next part of the book and also the accompanying afterword by Petr Blažek, The Fate of the Good Soldier Pavel Vošický, which comments on and illustrates with contemporary documents the almost tragicomic story of the imprisonment of the non-conformist and plain-spoken soldier:
"25 Aug 1959 : Private Vosicky suggested that we might try to catch Free Europe. The source replied that there was no point, that they wouldn't catch anything anyway. Voj. VOŠICKÝ said that he would do the session himself. Indeed, exactly according to the broadcasts made by the SE, he began to give reports where he talked about the launch of the US satellite o 7 q and other Western conveniences. Then he switched to English, where he said the same thing, and then to Russian, in which he repeated the news of the "Red Terror" (...) After this, he signed up Soldier. LAVIČKA with "The Ballad of the Congress" (in which the Soviet Union and the President of the Republic, Antonin Zapotocky, are slandered), which he read out, and as soon as it was read out by Voj. VOSHITSKY heard it, he immediately demanded that he would copy it on a typewriter."
Pavel Vošický's book is available for purchase at the information centre of the Hybernská Campus and also on 15 March 2022 in the café during the author's reading.