Jiří Maršík

* 1951

  • “I gave my [party member] card back right in 1990.” – “Was that a relief for you?” – “It was, for sure. I realised I finally didn’t have to pretend or attend meetings that bored me. There was a transitional period, though. A certain faction of communists – I don’t recall what they called themselves – wanted to make communism acceptable. I remember us trying to convince them at a conference in the local community centre that things should be done differently, in a way that would benefit the people. But there were a lot of old folks who wouldn’t accept that, claiming that the party and its relationship to Russia should be kept as is. So, we said: ‘If they disagree with our take on modern communism, we don’t want anything to do with their old concept’. We gave our member cards back and moved on to different platforms. I never joined any other party afterwards, though.”

  • “My teacher Eduard ‘Eda’ Havránek was a communist too. He approached me (while at the technical high school) saying they needed some young folks to bring some life into the local communist group. He asked me if I was interested in joining, arguing that if you want to do something for society, you need to approach it from within; there is no way to achieve anything from outside.” – “What did it mean, ‘approach it from within’?” – “It meant being active inside [the party] while remaining able to keep communism within the confines of democracy… or decency, as we used to say back then. To make sure that there are people [in the party] who are pro-country and pro-people and do things to benefit the country and not primarily to gain personal benefits. He convinced me that I had all it took to bring something to the table – and I agreed to join the communist party while still in high school. At first, I became a candidate for membership, and then I obtained a full membership.”

  • “I think we didn’t grasp it completely at first because it wasn’t too forceful in the transitional period; no one said, you must stop now. We were told the scout movement needed to regenerate. We kept hoping it would regenerate into something passable. Many people who had witnessed 1948 didn’t believe it, and said matters would only get worse.” – “Did they say there could be a way to do it?” – “Some said there could be a way, and others said it was all over. We were undecided; we didn’t know what would happen. We tried to run our camp as usual to give the children a great experience. When the camp was over, we were told not to wear brown scarves or lily badges anymore, and to join the pioneers if we wanted to continue. Some of us didn’t want to just shut down and tell the kids, go play in the streets again, because we saw they were enjoying it and we wanted to be with them, so we said we would continue.”

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    Mladá Boleslav, 01.02.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:15:35
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From being a scout to being a pioneer and a communist. He wanted to keep working with children

Jiří Maršík was a member of the Mladá Boleslav mountain climbing club; they climbed rocks in Český ráj, the Tatras and even the Caucasus
Jiří Maršík was a member of the Mladá Boleslav mountain climbing club; they climbed rocks in Český ráj, the Tatras and even the Caucasus
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Jiří Maršík was born in Mladá Boleslav on 12 October 1951. His father worked with the police (SNB), then with the State Security (StB), focusing on the protection of Škoda Mladá Boleslav’s industrial secrets. The witness got a vocational training as a router operator, then completed a technical high school. He was a boy scout in the late 1960s. When the communists banned the Junák (scout) movement again in 1970, he joined the communist ‘pioneer’ organisation. He joined the CPC while a high school student. Later on, he was active as a secretary for pioneer activities under the District Committee of the Socialist Youth Union (SSM), and later still he helmed the town’s pioneers’ leisure centre (MDPM). He organised hobby clubs and camps for children well into the 1990s, obtaining pedagogical education along the way. He exited the CPC in 1990. When Mladá Boleslav’s municipal facilities for children merged, he was forced to leave his job and start working with the town’s water and wastewater service company. He was living in Žerčice in 2023.