Marcel Winter

* 1948

  • “The most despicable wardens were Hradec Králové where I was being held in custody. For example, after they found out I was smoking, they would bring cigarettes, as you could buy stuff once a week, and they would say: 'The matches are sold out.' So, we had to get toilet paper and shred it, and as one of us wore glasses, we were trying to light the paper using the lens and sunbeams. And they were having a laugh. They would say: 'Cigarettes are sold out,' or if there were any, if they brought you what you ordered, it was: 'The matches are sold out.'

  • “The interrogation went like this: at Public Security, at the criminal police, there was this former supermarket director, sitting casually on the table, almost lying on it. He was on friendly terms with them indeed. And he was trying to interrogate me, and I kept telling him: 'Listen, I didn't steal, not even a few pennies, nothing. And if I did, just sentence me and get over with it.' But every checkout counter had those slips with codes and numbers. And it had to match. And you would hand over those slips, they would take it with them. So, they let me go. But after maybe 14 days, they came again and took me for another interrogation, they took me to the prosecutor in Hradec Králové so he could put me in custody which he did do. And I can still recall those men from the criminal police, telling me during the interrogation: 'Confess or we will make your wife a whore and those three kids of yours will end up in an orphanage.' So, I won't hide that tears were running from my eyes as I imagined this really happening.”

  • “The year was 1971, as they started to persecute right-wingers. There were those two militia men who came to my office with sub-machine guns. And they led me all the way across the ZVÚ to the gate. And people, that's something I wouldn't forget, there were windows wide open, they were waving me goodbye, so maybe some of those officials knew, but they acted like human beings, at least some of them. So, they took me into this Civil Defence Shelter, which was under this little square, behind a gate, I had never been there before. They brought a chair for me to sit on, I can still see it, it was in the centre of the room, and they would walk around, and the first question they gave me was: 'Where did your father hide all the gold?' As my father was a private dentist, he died in 1969, just two days before Christmas, so they were quite inquisitive. And in the end, a militia man and a gatekeeper took me out of the factory, stating that I was a right-wing opportunist and an undesirable character.”

  • “In the course of the totalitarian era, I had to change jobs fifteen times and to move three times with my family. Later, there was even this ban, that no one could employ me in a sixty-kilometre radius around Hradec Králové. I didn't know why they were so afraid of me. Maybe the reason was that I was involved in arts and culture. Only after the revolution I saw this second reference of mine, I didn't know there were two of them, so I found out that there was a note: 'Father stood in the way of building socialism.' And as I was concerned, 'He has influence over young people so we should keep an eye on him.' And I could be maybe forty years old, and this note was still there.”

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My father was an entrepreneur, therefore I had to go to prison

Marcel Winter in 1959
Marcel Winter in 1959
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Marcel Winter was born on March 26th, 1948, in Hradec Králové. His mother, Helena, née Marková, was a company dentist at the Hradec Králové‘s Gumokov National Enterprise; his father, Arnošt, was supposedly the only dentist in the country who was allowed to keep his private office after February 1948, working from the Winter‘s family flat. Marcel wasn‘t allowed to go to college. In 1968, he signed the Two Thousand Word petition; he also witnessed the funeral of Jan Palach in January 1969. Most of his life, he had been working in customer services. As a manager of a supermarket in Hradec Králové, he had been sentenced for two years and six months in prison for an alleged embezzlement of socialist property. While serving his sentence in the Libkovice Prison, he met Václav Benda, a dissident and a Charter 77 petitioner. Due to his unsuitable origins, he often had to change jobs and flats during the totalitarian regime. After the Velvet Revolution, he co-founded the Czech-Vietnamese Association which has been supporting Vietnamese living in the Czech Republic in their integration into the society and striving for greater cooperation between Vietnam and the Czech Republic. He visited Vietnam almost fifty times. Nowadays (2019), he has been serving as an honorary chairman as well as a spokesperson of the Czech-Vietnamese Association.