"Then, when we were in France in 1968, when we were finally allowed to travel, they offered him that he could stay there, in France, that he would get citizenship immediately, and so would my mother and I, and a job of course, and a pension, everything. They respected him very much. But my father wanted to go back. I would have stayed there, but he wanted to go back. He used to say, 'If you want to stay here, stay here, but I'm going back home.' I was the only son and I was afraid that if I stayed there, it would be forever and there would be no one to take care of my parents when they were old, so I went back too."
"Somehow we found out the day before, so my mother was expecting him [my father]. I was at school. When I got home, he was already there." - "How did it go?" - "We kind of looked at each other. It was the first time we saw each other properly. It was kind of..." - "Was it awkward?" - "It was awkward." - "What did you think about him? How was he mentally?" - "He was still in good shape mentally after he came back, I think. He taught me French, Latin. He wanted me to be educated, so I did my best."
"When my dad was in the Jáchymov region, but it wasn't exactly there, it was somewhere, I think the name was Ostrov near something..."
- "I know. It's not far from Jáchymov." - "Not far from Jáchymov. And I remember the guards from there and what it looked like. I remember that... I was told I entertained the guards there because I didn’t really enjoy long waiting when I was a kid. I used to say that my grandmother listens to Free Europe, and things like that. The guards laughed."
František Boublík was born on April 13, 1949 in Prague to Karolína and František Boublík. His father was arrested by the State Security in February 1949, before František even was born, and he also took part in the Battle of France during World War II and later became involved in resistance activities there. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison in a show trial in 1949. However, at the end he was imprisoned for eleven and a half years. As a child, František Boublík lived alternately with his mother, Karolina Boublíková, in Prague and with his grandparents in Šumava. Although he visited his father several times a year, he was unable to build a relationship with him. During his father‘s absence, they spent a lot of time with other families of political prisoners. In 1960, his father was released under an amnesty. František Boublík graduated from high school and in 1967 started studying at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, where he studied economics. During the Warsaw Pact invasion he was in France with his parents. In 1972, he successfully graduated and joined a one-year compulsory military service. He got married and had two children. Until 1989 he worked as an economist in the Unified Agricultural Cooperative (JZD) Kunice. In 2023 František Boublík lived in Petříkov near Velké Popovice.
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