Jaroslav Klouda

* 1931

  • "That was, of course, the Slánský, Horáková, a huge affair. You could say that I didn't realise what was going on at the time. We considered it something that was inappropriate, but the whole context, when you look at it in terms of age. So we... It made you speechless. The context... In any case. I've had a career as a judge. It was only as a judge, this of course has nothing to do with politics, that I came to the conclusion that the death penalty is an inadequate punishment because you don't give life to a person and you have no right to take it away."

  • "In the early 1970s, when (U.S. Ambassador John Baker) was in our apartment, we were living in Brevnov at the time. He offered me, my wife Rosenka was not there at the time, he offered to arrange for my emigration to the United States and then, sometime later, he would try from his diplomatic position to get my family to go there. We had a one-year-old son at the time. I said to him, 'John, but someone has to stay here..."

  • "I was clearly in favour of a solution which, in my opinion, should have and could have led to social justice, but it turned out in my mature age that this idea was basically impossible to be practically implemented. Because the mentality of man is different than that of some dream communist society, equal for all. But unfortunately that's an old man's observation. I was clearly active at that time [during "socialist" Czechoslovakia]."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 21.11.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:13:12
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Praha, 24.11.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:09:23
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Only in adulthood did I realise that the communist idea is not possible

Jaroslav Klouda (undated)
Jaroslav Klouda (undated)
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Jaroslav Klouda was born on 30 July 1931 and grew up in the South Moravian village of Drásov. His father, Otakar Klouda, was a cantor, headmaster of a primary school and after 1945 a member of the Communist Party. After the Second World War the family moved to Brno. He entered the grammar school there. In 1949, he joined the Youth Leads Brno event organised by the then regional secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Otto Šling. At the same time, he himself joined the Communist Party. At the beginning of the 1950s, he began studying at the Faculty of Law of Charles University in Prague. In 1956 he travelled as a member of a university delegation to Dubrovnik, Vienna and Paris. In 1957, he joined the Municipal Court in Prague and became a councillor of the City of Prague. From 1964 to 1970 he served as chairman of the District National Committee (ONV) of Prague 6. After he publicly disagreed with the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, he lost his membership in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia during the normalisation period and had to leave his position as chairman of the ONV. In 1975 he lost his position in the court. He found employment in the investment department of the Transport Company in Prague and was able to travel abroad on business trips. After the revolution, he returned to advocacy. In 2023 he lived in Prague.