Jaroslav Fous

* 1946

  • "Well, as a reward, we were going to Leipzig, for example, for a trade fair. It was again one big deception, because they had nothing to exhibit anywhere, so they did their things like that, it was Budapest and it was Leipzig and there was a giant pavilion, a giant star on it and it was the Soviet Union, exhibiting there. And the only thing that got into the largest hall was the twisting crankshaft from the ship's engine. And it was, it bent over during the transportation and it was shaking there. And I'm telling the Soviet expert, Aljo, it shakes somehow. And he refuses it and says that it is on purpose. And otherwise there was nothing. Well, if our exhibitors had there something, they were from Prague… I remember, they did drilling equipment there. I went there to see and I say, how do you grind those cross crowns here? There they had a grinder for it. He says, don't touch it, someone will want to see it, it doesn't work at all, it is just to have something here. The only thing that had any value was Brno. There were the western ones and there you could see what is probably being done elsewhere and where we are."

  • "He then invited her there, she was also invited to Canada (mother, note). She was a member of the party too, because she was afraid that she would hurt her family, so she joined them. Well, before she flew there, this party chairman on the party committee, he said 'Mrs. comrade, when you return, you have to give us a report on what it looks like there'. She wrote everything down honestly, but she took it from a woman's point of view, so she didn't take any politics there, but she took how much a kilo of sirloin costs, how much costs this and that there. As they always had this committee, they always met once a month, so Franta Malý says, so now Mrs. Comrade Fousová will tell us something, she came back from the west so we would know what it looks like there. So that everyone would not just say that everything falls right in one's lap. So, she tells us something about it… I wrote it all down, dear comrade, and here I have it like this, so I'll read it to you. She had written there how much things cost there, she was not interested in other things. What can be bought there and what is not here. And first, that she saw an automatic washing machine with a dryer, and we still had necky (a wooden wash tube) at home with a washboard."

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Socialism was one big deception

Jaroslav Fous 1961
Jaroslav Fous 1961
zdroj: archive of the witness

Jaroslav Fous was born on June 22, 1946 in Háje u Příbrami as the third of five children. During the war, his father was deployed in Germany for forced labor, from which he managed to escape. After a primary school, Jaroslav trained as a mechanical engineer and worked in a factory in Sedlčany. He completed the military service in Moravia at the border guard. He shot competitively and won the national championship in the military service. He could go to the Olympics of friendly armies to Bulgaria on the condition that he would become a professional soldier. He refused. After the war, he joined Uranové doly in the shaft 16 as a mechanical engineer for the maintenance of drilling rigs, where he worked for over twenty years. In the summer of 1969, his brother Josef emigrated first to Germany and then to Canada. They were allowed to write and make phone calls, but letters were censored and phone calls were tapped. At the same time, Jaroslav Fous got married and he has two children with his wife. Stb interrogated him several times due to contacts with his brother in exile. He was not allowed to travel anywhere for ten years. Jaroslav met his brother in 1984 in Yugoslavia, and was again investigated for unauthorized contact with a stranger. He was released to Calgary to see him in 1987. The family did not meet freely until 1990. Jaroslav Fous lives in Příbram.