I.
A
Correction
In the
‘Encounters with Oxford dons – 2nd continuation’ published on 26th
July I made a few mistakes, one of which is serious. I’ll give the correction
in its broader context, marking the corrected sentence in bold.
In ‘The Pub
Philosopher’, published in The Independent Magazine on 18th
November 1989 – i.e. a day after the Velvet Revolution began in Prague – Nick
Cohen quoted an Oxford professor who said about me: ‘you can disguise paranoia
in the East. There are so many real conspiracies. There aren’t the same excuses
when you come to the West.’ Nick Cohen added: ‘How dare pampered Oxford dons
condemn a man who has been sent in and out of jail since he was 18 for standing
up for humanist values? It sounds scandalous until you hear Tomin happily
accuse classical philosophers of conspiring to destroy him because he could
expose their ignorance, or of collaborating with the Czech authorities.’ The
article is full of gross inaccuracies and distortions [it can be seen on my
website] …
I never
accused classical philosophers ‘of conspiring to destroy me’, nor did I ever
say that they ‘collaborated with the Czech authorities.’ I told Cohen what I
experienced in very concrete terms, but he put into my mouth his own
generalizations, which were false. He did it so that every reader would agree
with the anonymously quoted professor: ‘“I don’t wish to sound East European,” said
one, “but perhaps he does need psychiatric help.”’
Let me point
out a few things I told Cohen. During the first two years in Oxford I lived
with my family in a house hired by Dr Kathleen Wilkes, who was the first Oxford
visitor in my seminar; we lived on the ground floor, she on the upper floor. We
were often visited by Roger Scruton and Alan Montefiore who discussed with
Kathy Oxford activities in Czechoslovakia. They divided them into open
activities, namely the visits in Ladislav Hejdánek’s seminar, viewed as a
smokescreen that shielded their truly important activities in Petr Rezek’s
seminar, held in secrecy. I told them that it was naïve to believe that the
secret police knew nothing of Rezek’s seminar. Alan Montefiore asked me how
I can say that Rezek’s seminar is not secret, when people in Prague are
confident that their meetings are secret. In those days I was receiving an
emigrant journal Svědectví, published in France. I showed Alan the issue
in which a Frenchman wrote about his visit in Rezek’s seminar. I said: ‘Alan,
it is still possible that the Czechoslovak secret police knows nothing about
the seminar, but only if the KGB gave a strict order that the department in
Czechoslovak Ministry of Internal Affairs, which monitors Svědectví,
must leave this particular issue untouched.’ I told Cohen that the Czechoslovak
secret police was undoubtedly interested in the secrecy of Rezek’s seminar;
that’s what the secret police is all about, operating in secrecy. It made me
sad that Oxford dons adopted this myth of secrecy. On another time Alan asked
me: ‘Do you think that we have betrayed you?’ I replied: ‘You cannot betray me;
you have betrayed yourselves.’
***
II.
For
the record
Let me use
this opportunity to bring some light on a passage in Barbara Day’s The Velvet
Philosophers (The Claridge Press, 1999, pp. 39-40):
‘The
Sub-Faculty of philosophy had agreed, with money from the Literae Humaniores
Board, to send as the next visitor the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor,
Chichele Professor of Social and Political Thought at All Souls College. On
Tuesday 5th June Wilkes came to Luke’s room in Balliol College to
brief Taylor.
Whilst the
Oxford philosophers were pressing a normally indifferent British press and
public to take notice of the Czech philosophers, a situation was unfolding in
Prague which was to influence both the development of the seminars and the
future of the Tomin family. It began with one of those incidents which in a
police state can either be attributed to malicious brutality or interpreted
as a step in a more complex plan [the emphasis is mine, J.T.]. On the same
June evening as Wilkes, Lukes and Taylor were sitting in Balliol discussing the
Prague seminar, Zdena Tominová was on her way home from a visit to
Jiří Gruša and his family. Entering the main door of no. 4 Keramická Street, she was attacked by a masked
man. Passers-by rescued her, but not before she had been severely beaten. An
ambulance was called and she was hospitalised with concussion. The news reached
Tomin, on night duty at the zoo, who visited her at the Na Františku hospital. Returning to work in an
emotional state, he neglected his rounds to write a letter to President Husák; he was convinced there had been an
attempt to murder Zdena and that he was to have been accused of the murder.’
It is not
true that Zdena was severely beaten. She was hit just once, at the back of her
head, presumably with a truncheon. The blow made her lose consciousness. The
attacker presumably caught her; he did not let her fall, for the only injury
she had was form that one blow.
To attack
just one of us did not make sense; in those days we stood shoulder to shoulder.
Less than a year before the police tried to frame me, accusing me of robbery.
So, after I returned to the zoo from the hospital, I went to the office of the
director of the zoo and wrote a letter to the President, which I headed with a
question: ‘Was it to be a murder?’ I made as many copies as I could put in the
typewriter, about eight. Had the blow been fatal, returning from my night shift
I would have been the first to find my wife dead. The secret police would have
had to find the murderer, and I would have been a welcome suspect. When I
finished the letter, I locked the zoo and went around Prague, posting a copy in
letterboxes of prominent dissidents. With every letter delivered I felt better;
I knew that at least one of them would pass the letter to the West. And indeed,
the letter was published in the West German Die Welt.
On the next
day I learnt that my conjecture was wrong; for on the night Zdena was attacked
I was to be kidnapped during my night round in the zoo. How do I know this? In
the evening, on 6th June, I went to work as usual. When I entered
the Reception, there was a new night-watchman sitting with two or three other
men, and they looked at me as if I was a ghost. Then they told me that they
were informed that I had been kidnapped during my night-shift. About two hours
later came the deputy director of the zoo, heavily drunk, and said that on the
previous night he was instructed to call the police and inform them that I was
kidnapped during my night-round.
Let me now
go back to the attack on Zdena. When I visited her on the 5th June,
just after the attack, she told me that before she was taken int the ambulance,
she managed to hide her bag with Charter 77 documents into a shrub in front of
the house. She was anxious for me to retrieve it, which I did. When we
discussed the attack later, Zdena remembered that she was followed by a police
car, as usual in those days, all the way from Gruša’s, but that the car drove off just
before she entered Šmeralova Street, the street that leads to Keramická Street. On the corner of Šmeralova Street
was another car, which looked like a Secret police car, with the crew sitting
inside. My conjecture is that we both were to be kidnapped. In Zdena’s case,
the kidnapping was prevented by a group of people returning from cinema; the
attacker panicked and ran away. In my case, it was prevented by a neighbour,
one of that group, who phoned me to the zoo; instead of going on my round, I
went to visit Zdena in the hospital. It is a long journey; it must have taken
me at least three hours before I returned to the zoo, and then, instead of going
on my round I wrote the letter to the President concerning the attack on Zdena.
When I
visited my wife the next day, she was very frightened, for the doctor wanted to
transfer her to a psychiatric hospital. I signed a document that I am taking
her away at my own responsibility, ordered a taxi, and we got home.
In the
‘Encounters with Oxford dons – 2nd continuation’ published on 26th
July, I speak of the two attempts by the Secret police to get me into a
psychiatric hospital, and of the persisting ‘information’ both in the British
and in the Czechoslovak press about my having been hospitalised in a
psychiatric hospital. In view of all this I must ask, was it not on 5th
June that the first attempt to hospitalise me – and Zdena incidentally – in a
psychiatric hospital took place? Wasn’t rescuing us and bringing us to Oxford one of Charles Taylor’s tasks?
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