Oto Šacher

* 1941

  • “I couldn't get any leadership position before, but after 1989, as the regime changed, I became the deputy director of the entire factory in 1990. I held this position for three years. But then some clever guys privatized a project there, each of them invested thirty thousand CZK and they got a factory of 400 million CZK. So I couldn't take it anymore and I left in 1993. It was the Bolsheviks who left in the 1989, and returned after that privatization.”

  • “We were approaching the borders and I was thinking, 'For God's sake, what's going on here?' We drove through some kind of roadblocks, we reached the customs and we were told to unload everything out of the car. I was furious because I had it all nicely organized there. We had to take everything out. Then they let us go, we drove a kilometre and there was already a free life. We took a deep breath as if coming to another world. It was Austria. I remember we stopped in Salzburg, my son stared open-mouthed at the motorbikes and cars because he'd never seen anything like that before. And all sorts of cups, Coca-Cola, stickers. He was astounded.”

  • “In that year forty-eight or forty-nine, the nationalization came, so the workshop was no longer my father's, it was a cooperative, although my father worked there even then for a while. He worked as a master, in his own workshop, but it already belonged to someone else. And my mother was at home all the time and after the nationalization of the workshop she had to go to work, so she worked three shifts in Retex in Ivančice. So she was hurt by the nationalization too.”

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    Brno, 23.09.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 02:03:03
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - JMK REG ED
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I was labelled: father self-employed, uncle emigrated

Oto Šacher, 1961
Oto Šacher, 1961
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Oto Šacher was born on 11 October 1941 in Ivančice in the Brno region. He comes from a family of craftsmen. His father Antonín (1910-1973) ran his own carpentry workshop, in which he employed other craftsmen. His mother Gabriela (1914-1971) took care of their household. His uncle Otto Šacher (1917-1990) was a veteran of the WWII from the ranks of the French Foreign Legion, the Free France Forces and finally the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps. Due to his uncle‘s resistance activities, the Nazis imprisoned his father Antonín in Kounicovy koleje in Brno during the war, and they sent his grandmother Žofie to the detention camp in Svatobořice. After the February coup in 1948, the parents lost their business. In the 1950s, Oto Šacher graduated from the Secondary School of Electrical Engineering in Brno, but he couldn‘t attend university due to his family background. He worked shortly in Tesla in Rožnov, and after returning from the military service in 1962, he joined the Avia company in Ivančice, where he remained until the Velvet Revolution. In 1978, he legally travelled to Switzerland, where he wanted to settle with his family. However, the youngest son didn‘t get the travel permission, that‘s how the Communists secured the return of the rest of the family. In 1990, after more than 40 years, he met his uncle Otto Šacher in France. At the time of filming (2020), Oto Šacher lived in his native Ivančice.