Ota Maňák

* 1952

  • “I was approached by a colleague who ran a theatre club, asking if I could compose some songs based on the lyrics he presented me. I turned those lyrics into songs. And who will teach the songs to the children? So I taught it to my two children, and we went to the theatre club, and I stayed in that theatre club. So I thought that since I am here and working with them, we will create a music section in that theatre. So I led the children and picked the more skilled children who had a relationship with music and could sing. Then we called that music section Sluníčko, and Sluníško still exists today.”

  • “I watched over the border to prevent people from fleeing Czechoslovakia. I served on the border, I watched the border so that people from Czechoslovakia did not run abroad to the West. I was the bad one. I joined as a shooter, but because I ran well, they eventually made me a dog handler. Basic training and probably the entire service was held near Bratislava, the section of Levárky on the border with Austria. At the military camp, they tried to lure me into the Communist Party. The captain himself came to see if I wanted to join that– that association of communists. At the time, I told him that I didn't feel politically mature yet. We had socialist pep talks there with the border guards, but we all kind of didn’t care because we just didn’t give a damn about any of it. Because we grew up in communism from the beginning. That's how we lived. We were not surprised that we had to go to the monument as children, or to go to a lantern parade. I didn’t even know why I was going there with a lantern. The first of May, it was a holiday, that’s how we experienced it, we always got beer, sausage or that yellow soda. We didn’t catch anyone at that military camp. Some drunk got lost there. There was no shooting here like in the King of Šumava (Král Šumavy, Czech movie, trans.).”

  • “I was a fourteen-year-old boy at the time and didn’t understand it at all. We only knew that they simply broke in here in 1968 and that there were some tanks in front of the station in Bohumín. We were cut off somewhere, three kilometres from civilization. The information did not reach us as intensively as it does today. In agriculture, life was still the same: at five or four o’clock you had to get up to go to the cowshed and us to school. No one talked about it with the kids. Today, the information arrives within ten minutes, but back then, it took awfully long. I only knew about the dances in Bohumín by hearsay. A colleague who lived where I did–a little older–went to work there. He came and said that the Russians were there with tanks, but we were not directly involved. In the following year, there were those reactions. The elders signed some petitions there, and there was a state collection. I don’t understand at all what it was, that they just donated some money. I don’t know, and I never tried to find out where it ended up, I don’t know.”

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    Ostrava, 17.08.2022

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    Ostrava, 08.10.2022

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A Roma boy wanted to be a mineworker. Mom knocked it out of him, and he‘s a musician.

Ota Maňák in a picture from the primary school in Dolní Lutyně in 1966
Ota Maňák in a picture from the primary school in Dolní Lutyně in 1966
zdroj: witness archive

Ota Maňák was born on 26 October 1952 in Rýmařov. He doesn‘t know his real parents. He only knows their names and that the mother was a young Roma woman. He spent two years in a children’s home in Rýmařov. Then he was adopted by Josef and Blažena Maňák. He has their last name. The family lived in the village of Malé Šťáhle near Rýmařov, where his father used horses to collect wood at the local sawmill. The parents then both worked in the local unified agricultural cooperative. In 1962, they moved to the village of Dolní Lutyně near Bohumín. Here, the parents worked in agriculture on a state farm located in a secluded area. Ota Maňák had been playing the guitar since he was 14 years old. After elementary school, he completed a two-year apprenticeship as a steel rope winder at the Bohumín Ironworks and Wireworks. He served his basic military service as a border guard in the Levárky area near Bratislava on the Czechoslovak-Austrian border. After his basic military service, he started working in the Bohumín Ironworks and Wireworks. He also engaged a lot in music. He played guitar in the bands Akord and Orion. He got married and had a daughter and a son. Later, he started composing his own music for a children’s theatre group, and gradually the vocal group Sluníčko was formed. Ota Maňák accompanied them on guitar. At the end of the eighties, Sluníčko was already giving concerts all over Czechoslovakia. At that time, Ota Maňák divorced his first wife and married a second wife, who sang in the band Sluníčko. After 1989, there were fewer concert opportunities, and Ota Maňák started a business. He started a carpentry business with two partners. The business was not successful. Ota Maňák then had to support himself through manual labour for some time. Finally, he returned fully to music. He started performing with Sluníčko again, and the group released their own CD. He writes songs for Sluníčko and composes scenic music for an amateur theatre. He also composed a children’s opera. He cooperates with the Moravian-Silesian National Theater in Ostrava. In 1995, he performed as a musician in the play Ballad for a Bandit. He played as an actor for 12 years in the very successful performance “Do naha” (Strip naked, trans.) or as Ostrava people say “Holé dupy” (Bare ass, trans.). He also had solo performances with the guitar. In 2022, he lived in Bohumín.