Jan Hrach

* 1928

  • "Every newsroom or every, I don't know, section in television had a censor. The censor was the person to whom all things had to come, and he had to put a stamp on it that he had read it and that there was nothing against the communists. Because the communists were afraid of any hint. Like when you went to Suchý´s theatre, he had a lot of jokes that were against the communists. And on television they were very careful about that."

  • "I will first stop at the name Emanuel Moravec. During the First Republic, when Masaryk and Beneš ruled, Moravec was a colonel on the general staff of our Czech army. Who, when the Germans came... he had been a commentator, a military-political commentator. And he had been against the Germans all the time. When the Germans came, he himself said: 'I tied all my anti-German things in a bundle, I went to them and told them who I was - they knew it well, because they were watching him - and I offered them cooperation.' And the Germans took him. So Moravec was, I have to put it in very precise terms, the biggest swine of the Czech nation, who was not only kissing the Germans' ass, that's not enough. Moravec just wanted even the children to go to the Curatorium."

  • "As far as textbooks are concerned, it started with the fact that we had to bring all the textbooks and everywhere the word Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrique Masaryk... All the things that the Germans didn't like were erased. We had to do it in black ink. We did that for days, all those textbooks. So that there was nothing that was against the Germans."

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    Praha, 06.12.2018

    (audio)
    délka: 01:00:50
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
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Portrait
Portrait
zdroj: witness´s archive

Jan Hrach was born on 13 July 1928 in Prague. As a child and his father met T. G. Masaryk. As a school child he perceived the tense atmosphere during the Munich crisis. During the war, he became a member of Disman‘s Radio Children‘s Ensemble, where he also joined the anti-Nazi resistance - he and his friends worked as liaisons, and members of the choir also secretly filmed anti-Nazi sketches. They were also involved in the events of the Prague Uprising, with a gun in their hands they besieged the Vinohrady Sokol Hall during the time when it was occupied by German gunmen. He graduated in economics and in 1956 became an employee of Czechoslovak Television, where he worked as an editor of Television News, focusing on agriculture. His television career was ended by the occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. With two colleagues he hid in Brdy, where there was to be an illegal television studio. The broadcast never took place, but his anti-occupation stance got him fired from television. For some time he worked as a cleaner and later as a lawyer.