František Švarc

* 1953

  • “My father was a convinced communist, he never wanted anything, never got anything and he believed it until his death. And at the end of his life, when he was dying, he lived with me and that is why he said: ‘I lived to see communism, however, capitalism had to come for me to see it.‘ Because he lived with me for free, he paid me nothing and he had a bar there, a nice one, he went to get a beer there and he and his friends, gravediggers, those people who were typical of Vinoř, made coffee with rum there. They were sitting on the terrace and he would say: ‘Go, get him a Pilsen beer here, for free, go and make her a coffee with rum, for free.‘ He said: ‘I live in communism, I lived to see it here, however, capitalism had to come for me to live to see communism.‘ Nevertheless, he did not live for long. He died in 1999.”

  • „They called him SS man Kostka. He was Czech, he got married here and had some German relatives so he was enlisted in Abwehr behind the polar circle, I mean Kostka. And he got married there again. He married once here and once in Norway. The war ended, he was there for two more years after the war and he kept guarding the firing position on the battlefield before he was told the war had ended; well, then they deported him back here to our golden Republic where they immediately imprisoned him for being SS man, they broke his hands and legs there, everything and when he got out of the prison, he started to work in a nickel mining company, he did hard, stupid and unhealthy work. Well, this Kostka taught me German. And it was a problem because when I and my wife wanted to go abroad, they only let her go as I was studying with SS man Kostka and (they thought) I would definitely stay there so the cadre officer did not let me go and my wife went there alone.”

  • “They were riding tanks around here demonstratively so that we could see who the boss was, and in front of the pub where we used to go sometimes for lemonade, cards, and beer, today it is called U Černínů restaurant, and those tanks knocked out a huge hole there when they were turning, it was a hole, it was like a mammoth trap. And when it rained there was water in it – and when a car was coming, we were looking at it and the car would fall in the hole… and it was completely wrecked.”

  • “My grandfather got a part of a field from the church because he worked as a gravedigger, so he got it instead of a salary. They built a little house on the field and farmed there. Well and then a communist came – he said they would build a road across our land. And the communist pretended they would give us a different property neighbouring ours so that we would not lose out on it. Well, grandmother signed it, and we did as well. We then went to ask them to give us a new land – and the communists said: ‘We already have completely different plans with the land we wanted to give you, so we will not give you anything. Because you still have enough. You have two thousand square meters. And some people have nothing at all. So be glad that we will not take away also those two thousand square metres from you.‘ That is why we got nothing.”

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    Praha - Vinoř, 12.08.2021

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Rudý Letov instead of Communist Party ID card

František Švarc in 1968
František Švarc in 1968
zdroj: František Švarc

František Švarc was born on 8 January 1953. Since childhood, he lived in Vinoř, a village near Prague that later became part of the capital. Both his parents were members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, his mother worked for the Ministry of Agriculture, and his father worked as an aviation engineer in the Avia company. František Švarc experienced the first minor issue concerning the regime in childhood when the village by fraud nationalised part of his grandparents‘ property. The invasion on 21 August 1968 meant a big shift in his mindset. He remembers celebrations of the victory of Czech hockey representation over the Soviet Union representation in March 1969 which were an unforgettable experience for him. Normalisation fully started later. His mother was fired from work and expelled from the Communist Party because she did not pass normalisation screenings. Besides other things, it later meant that František could not expect to study at university after his secondary school leaving exam. He repeatedly declined to join the Communist Party at work. He finally ended up working as a hardener in Rudý Letov. He started to learn German at that time. Thanks to it, he became an interpreter and translator in the second half of the 1980s. After 1989, he started a business in the field. That is why he could take care of his father who as a convinced communist finally admitted that communism came for him thanks to capitalism because everything was free for him in his son´s house. František Švarc became an active politician only in 2006. He became mayor of the Prague-Vinoř district and a Prague councillor for the Civic Democratic Party. To this day (2021) he is a member of the Vinoř municipal board, but above all, as he says, he enjoys a happy retirement.