"I remember one episode from the normalization era which I experienced when I was still working in the foreign trade company Strojimport (Strojexport). What happened was this: We were in a high-rise building near Olšany, and on the uppermost floor there was a department where documents were being photocopied. A young guy who worked in the turning machines department carried some documents upstairs to be photocopied. On his document folder there was his name and telephone number, and he had written the following inscription under it: ´If I'm not in my workplace, I'm on my way towards socialism.´ The lady, or the lady comrade, who worked there, took the folder and handed it to the head of the company. The director at that time was Mr., or comrade, Kalousek, who was a well-known dyed- in- the-woolcommunist. He had been in the committee which had built the Stalin's monument on Letná, and he had also been a member of the committee which later destroyed the monument. Among other things, he was a good friend of Kapek. Kapek, as you surely know, was the first secretary of the Prague section of the Communist Party. And thus, owing to this one affair, the career of one young boy in this company came to an end."
"Mom was asking: ´What has he done? When will they release him?´ Questions like this. ´If he hasn't done anything, we will let him go home.´ We lived like that and people around us stopped talking to us. They were afraid of us, they were no longer speaking to us, they avoided us. They were afraid, because this was the first intervention of the Gestapo in Mochov, and it was during the time after the assassination of Heydrich."
"The radio began broadcasting immediately after the end of the war. From May onward, every day from eleven in the evening even until midnight, editor Görl from the Czechoslovak Radio was broadcasting the names of people who had been released from concentration camps. He was reading the names for a very long time. I don’t remember, but it went on for a month, two months or three months, and he was reading the names in alphabetical order, and we were always waiting. When he began reading those beginning with ´M,´ we were... We were listening to this broadcast daily, and every day we were living with the hope, that he would read dad's name the following day. Well, nothing happened."
"After June 9 we were still expecting that dad would be released... Every ringing of the doorbell... When somebody rang, we shouted: ´He’s here!´ We lived by the main road leading from Prague to Poděbrady, cars were passing there, and whenever a car passed by and slowed down, we were afraid and we thought that somebody would come and ring the bell. We were slowly getting used to it, because people were telling us: ´You know, they got it all messed up, perhaps he is somewhere in a concentration camp.´ By that time people already knew that there were concentration camps, because they were listening to the radio broadcast from London."
Miroslav Mareček was born June 16, 1932 in Mochov. His father Alois Mareček was an active social democrat who was involved with labour unions before the war. He worked as a fitter in the local sugar refinery. The local member of the collaborationist organization Vlajka Málek informed on him to the authorities during the terror following Heydrich‘s assassination, and Mr. Mareček was thus arrested by the Gestapo on June 9, and executed on June 19 for allegedly approving of the assassination. The other members of the Mareček family found themselves in financial difficulties, but their father‘s colleagues from the sugar refinery helped them. His sister Marie was thus given a newsagent‘s kiosk, where she could earn a living for the family until the end of the war. The family learned about the fate of Alois Mareček from newspapers, but the truth about his death was confirmed only after the war. Miroslav became a member of the Communist Party after the war. He studied a secondary school of engineering and then began working in Strojexport. He also lived in Poland for five years while working for this company. During the intra-party purges at the beginning of the normalization era he was banned from his job on April 21, 1970. Alois has never learnt where his father was buried, because the Gestapo from Kolín had discarded all relevant documentation.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
