Michal Virák

* 1948

  • “I won’t deny this: he was in the CPC, I’m telling you. I spoke to him about it, and he said: ‘You see, we thought it could make things better after the war.’ Remember, they used to walk barefoot even during the winter back in Carpathian Ruthenia; the region was incredibly poor. But when things started to change later on, he was reluctant to walk away because he was not a local – he came from the East. Do you remember the film [Zdivočelá země] starring Martin Dejdar? There was this revolting Ukrainian, and then he disappeared… You’re not a hero every time.”

  • “That wasn’t a good thing to do. What they did was so stupid that they couldn’t possibly have done a stupider thing. Nobody would stand up against Russia here, not even in the past; it’s all of their own doing. They encouraged [our] nation to oppose them. The problem with Russians is that they act like conquerors wherever they come, and not like liberators. That’s their undoing.”

  • “The landscape was forested up there. Children lived in mixed families, Czech-German, Russian-Czech… There were Hungarians who had come from Slovakia. It was kind of strange. Every Saturday or Sunday, we would go to church in Bohosudov, the cathedral. That’s where I was baptised in ’48.” – “A Roman Catholic?” – “Yes, I’m a Roman Catholic. Those were wonderful years. The tobacconist's that my dad got under a government decree used to belong to a person who came from a Czech-German family; I wanted to know and found out. It was seized from them and we lived in the house, but the authorities gave it back to them in ’53. My mum and dad had to move out. So, we got a house not far from there. I remember that; I lived there for about four years.”

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    Mnichovo Hradiště, 26.09.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:51:56
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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Without Party membership, I was suddenly so low

Michal Virák in 2022
Michal Virák in 2022
zdroj: Post Bellum

Michal Virák was born in Unčín (Krupka today) on 18 June 1948. His father Michal Virák (formerly Virag) came from Carpathian Ruthenia. He enlisted with the Hungarian army in 1943. Two months later, he changed sides and joined the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps. He took part in the Carpathian-Dukla Operation in the autumn of 1944. He was injured in action near Mount Obšar. He spent the rest of the war in hospitals in Lviv and Sochi. Michal Virák Jr spent the first ten years of his life in the Czechoslovak borderland amidst multiple ethnic minorities. Having completed his primary education, he obtained a carpenter training at a railway repair plant. He joined the military in 1967 for the compulsory two-year service with the 103rd Tank Battalion in Milovice. Less than one year into his stint, he was reassigned to Horní Počernice as a carpenter with Vojenské stavby (military construction company). Following the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies, he was reassigned to Humenné in eastern Slovakia in September 1968. Following his military service, he initially worked as a press operator at Karbo in Benátky nad Jizerou. He was a candidate for membership in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, but did not become a full member eventually. He worked at Průmstav near Mnichovo Hradiště from 1977. He joined the Czechoslovak Legionnaire Association at the beginning of the new millennium. He was living in Mnichovo Hradiště in 2022.