Václav Šimák

* 1947

  • "We only made it harder for ourselves by making it public - that we helped Dr Horák and other people cross the border. They used it, then wanted us to prove it. That was the problem - my father didn't tell us anything about it. My brother was with him at the first crossing when they went to the border on a tractor. He didn't know who they were taking, he only knew his cousin Vašek Hejtmánek. He didn't know the others, he thought they were workers who were coming to help. Before my father died, he said to my brother, 'We transported these people, we helped them.' When it was first filmed [in 2006 for the Czech Television documentary series Tales of the Iron Curtain], he said that Dr Horák was also on the tractor with them. He didn't know these people and father didn't tell him anything. We had only one document stating that my father was at the border in the village of Pila and was detained there on 1 December 1949. That was the day Dr Horák crossed the border to Germany. Mr Engineer Vladimír Bayer [former head of the land office, who returned the property to the Šimák family] came with us. He also wanted to prove to them that we were right."

  • "My brother really wanted to go into business. He wanted to repair the property. He worked out a very good plan that we would make biodiesel. When we saw the payoff, we were in a hurry to get it going. We went to Pardubice to order some machines. We arranged in Germany that they would take the pellets from the rapeseed and the pressing."

  • "That was during the time they were hiding Dr Horák here with my aunt. He needed to get Dr Horáková's husband across the border. He was in such distress that he preferred to give up property to save a person. He was convinced that in a year or two, the system would collapse, and he would get his mill back. He said to himself, 'I'd rather save the many people who were involved in getting Bohuslav Horák across the border from Prague to Meclov.' Everyone knows what the punishments were like after 1948. My father could not understand the Czech nation. He said, 'The war ended, and everybody was shouting about how they wanted to punish the people who have murdered people here. And suddenly, three years later, the Czech nation started doing it to the Czech people. What happened to the nation that they started doing that?'"

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The Simaks discovered their father‘s heroism through restitution

Václav Šimák in 2022
Václav Šimák in 2022
zdroj: Pilsen studio

Josef Šimák was born the youngest of three children on 30 May 1947 in Meclov near Domažlice. In 1945, his parents Josef (1902) and Antonia (1911) were given a mill, a dwelling house, farm buildings and the land of the displaced German Karel Pawlik. During the war, his father worked in the mill in Přeštice and Dolní Lukavica, and because he was selling illegally ground flour to people, he was imprisoned for over six months. After the war, his father received a certificate that he had been a participant in the National Resistance, which gave him a discount when paying for the mill. In 1949 the communists confiscated the mill from the Šimák family. They stayed in the adjacent house, but had to pay for it again. Václav Šimák trained as an auto mechanic, worked in the workshop of the district veterinary administration in Domažlice and privatised it after 1989. The Šimák siblings asked for the return of the mill confiscated by the communists. The Land Office first returned it to them, then did not return it, the restitution process dragged on for 14 years, and the Šimák family was only granted restitution by the Supreme Court. Because of these delays, Brother Josef‘s vision of producing biodiesel and rapeseed pellets in the mill was eventually abandoned. The Šimák siblings wanted to prove that their father had voluntarily surrendered the mill to the communists only because he was in distress. He was hiding Bohuslav Horák, the husband of the executed Milada Horáková, whom he then smuggled across the border. They had only scraps of information about his father‘s heroism and were only vindicated by the memoirs of Bohuslav Horák himself, published in 2020. After the successful restitution, the Šimák siblings sold the mill and the house; due to their age, they no longer had the desire or energy to put the ruined buildings in order. Václav Šimák bought a house in Domažlice.