Ing. Jasoň Hampl

* 1931

  • "At Ivan's, I would say, intellectuals were meeting. Well, we used to go there a little bit, or one of my co-workers, Edvard Bakalář, brought me there once. I liked it, so I went there after that. That was about once a month, I would say. Somebody always prepared a paper and then the topic was discussed. I remember Havel, this time Václav. Ivan was nice, Václav was interesting. Václav sat there in the corner, now there were various discussions and he kept quiet. And when the discussion was almost over, he just came forward like this and very clearly formulated what came out of it and what to do next. He really had this gift of like, punctuating the important things."

  • "That I failed to cross the border, and that's how I ended up in jail. I got very little for that, eighteen months hard time. There were people who got ten years or more for the same thing. I tried not to annoy them because I didn't want it to get out that I belonged to this group in Prague. I was in Bratislava, trying to cross the Danube to Austria, and I got caught there. And they investigated me in Bratislava. Nowadays, in the computer age, it would be no problem for them to find out that I had some open activity in Prague. It wasn't then, so it was kept secret. I tried to play along. I even signed that I wanted to cooperate with the American CIA, which of course was stupid."

  • "What was the seizure of the monasteries, all the male monasteries, on April 14, I think it was 1951, don't you know, don't you remember? So I got out of there that way. It was in April, the seizure went like this. In the middle of the night, the police, civilians, which were probably State Security officers, raided the dormitory, and the Salesian who were with us, they ordered them, they had to pack up some of their plums and they took them somewhere unknown. Then we found out where, and those guys who were in the dormitory there, we finished the rest of the vacation. They assigned a proxy from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of the Interior to replace this leadership with these Selesians and of course to give it a Marxist coat of paint."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 17.02.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 02:24:37
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

We did the most against communism by raising our children to be decent people

Jasoň Hampl
Jasoň Hampl
zdroj: archive of a witness

Jasoň Hampl was born on 15 September 1931 in Prague. He grew up in poor circumstances, losing his father at the age of twelve. Then he entered the Salesian boarding school in Kobylisy. There, after 1948, he became involved in illegal church activities. In the boarding school he also experienced Operation K in April 1950, when the communist security apparatus occupied the male monasteries. The Salesian teachers were interned and replaced by teachers appointed by the ministry. Jasoň Hampl and a friend stole a cyclostyle from the boarding school so that it would not fall into the hands of the state, and later reproduced the Old Testament on it, which led to his prosecution in 1952. At that time he tried to emigrate to Austria. He tried to swim across the Danube near Bratislava, but was arrested and subsequently sentenced to an unconditional 18-month sentence. He served his sentence in Ilava and Jáchymov, and was released in 1953 on amnesty. He worked in a steelworks in Kladno and soon afterwards enlisted in the army. He then graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Czech Technical University. During normalisation he attended secret housing seminars with Ivan Havel. His cottage in the Jizera Mountains was a place of Christian meetings. He and his wife raised five children.