"I was impressed by Dubček, Svoboda, of course. But Daddy said, 'Well, Svoboda is from the Eastern Front. I don't know, I just don't trust them.' And we devoured the newspapers, of course, full of hope. That was the case with me at the age of twenty-one. So I don't think it was a shock to my father because he assumed that it would end badly somehow. He probably didn't expect the tanks, but like with the spa, he was able to accept it. I think it was a rational perspective on moments when few others are consumed by anything but emotion. It also explains the way I was brought up. A rational perspective on what would otherwise make me cry or simply lead me to despair. Back then, in that August, I was on a student exchange program I was organizing in Denmark. We hosted the Danish students first in Prague, a group of about fourteen or fifteen people, and then we went there from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. So there we saw a proper computer centre and things like that, not only Elsinor and not only the little mermaid. And we were leaving Copenhagen. I had then arranged to go to Britain, which attracted me very much. We were going by train, about four or five of us, to Hamburg. And on the night of August 20-21, a colleague, Hynek Biedermann, was listening to a transistor radio. I don't suppose you know what a transistor radio is anymore? You still know. He was just listening to a small radio, not in his ear, but just like that. And then he went round all the compartments where we were sleeping and said, 'Well, boys, it's ...' I won't quote the word, you can all guess - student speak, of course. And we were horrified, so what happened, that the tanks and that the airport... We got to Hamburg, we got off there with a colleague, Kamil Kellner. We walked, not desperately, but we wandered. We reached the Czechoslovak part of the Hamburg harbour, and there we saw the flag at half-mast and we cried."
"I didn't know where to go from the ninth grade. All I knew was that I definitely couldn't think about my father's field of study - medicine - because only working-class people could go to medicine. Even though my Daddy, when the universities were closed during World War II because he was running a spa or a medical facility, basically a back-up hospital, so he received two certificates of training as a waiter, so that he could eventually get a restaurant license, and as a high-pressure boiler fitter. So he had two more of those occupations if it came down to it. But, of course, because he was a doctor, and he was at the faculty, at the university, [studying medicine] was not an option fro me. And at that time, an auntie advised me to go to some secondary technical school that they would accept me there. So it was somehow considered. I didn't know, I really didn't know. And one day the deputy director at that time, that was Professor Ambrož, he called us one by one at an unguarded moment, when of course I didn't know yet, I hadn't made up my mind. And he said: 'Well, Honzík? I see for you a secondary general education school.‘ But to be honest, it was only because in his youth this Zdeněk Ambrož used to play tennis with my mother in Houšt'ka. Or that they knew each other well and of course he knew [my] not small, not zero, but negative cadre profile. But because he was the vice-principal, he could dare, because he knew even then that he was going to be appointed headmaster of the grammar school. Or that he would not be asked any questions in this case. So I was able to enter the secondary general education school in this evasive way. And perhaps it is also a good illustration that even under that red grip there were still people who did not strangle."
"I think my parents handled it very wisely, although it seemed childish at the time. When I was six months old, sometime in the autumn of 1947, around the time that my father's mother, my grandmother, died - so I can't remember her at all, of course, but there is a photograph of her - so at this time they had the house we lived in, and the garden and another part of perhaps the future Spa Park, deeded over to the six-month-old infant, because they already suspected that some nationalisation might come. And that was a good thing, of course, although, as I say, a little bit perhaps ridiculous at the time, because then when the 25th came along. February, even later, only sometime in May, the 'Lex Králík', how else to call it, was issued, which said that all the property of Dr. Vojmír Králík, the then owner of the spa, my daddy, the spa in Toušeň, was to be nationalized, and that property did not include the house and did not include the garden and did not include a piece of the park. So with the nationalisation our family did not lose the roof over our heads. That was very fortunate, and of course I had a lot of problems with that afterwards, because when I had to write in the cadre reports the property background, I always had to admit that I, as a student, a younger person, had a house and a garden, and of course there were questions, 'How did you get that?' and so on. So, as always everything in life, black and white."
RNDr. Jan Králík, CSc., was born on 21 March 1947 in Toušeň into a family connected with the local spa. His father Vojmír Králík was a doctor and a leading Czech balneologist, his mother Alena graduated from the business academy in Karlín and was responsible for administration and finance at the spa. The family business, founded by great-grandfather Jan Králík in 1868, was nationalized by the communist regime in 1949. Jan Králík was not allowed to go to medical school because of his cadre profile. He therefore graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University, where he specialised in probability theory and mathematical statistics. At the time of the occupation, in August 1968, he was on an exchange visit to Great Britain, where he had the opportunity to stay, but returned home. After graduating from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in 1970, he won a competition to join the Institute for the Czech Language of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, where he worked on automatic Czech language processing. He collaborated in the development of the first Czech language corpus and was at the origin of the method of preserving diacritics in computer systems. He studied linguistics as a postgraduate at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in 1972-1974. He also devoted his whole life to music. He completed postgraduate studies in music criticism, learned singing and worked with the organization Musical Youth. He contributed to music magazines, presented radio programmes and participated in the publication of opera recordings. After 1989, he was finally able to devote himself fully to academic activities - he lectured at the universities of Trier and Graz, published scientific studies and devoted himself to music journalism, especially Czech opera. In 1995 he won the German Gramophone Critics‘ Prize for his complete set The Complete Destinn. In 2024 he was living in Lázně Toušeň.
