"Well, there were more than one of those moments, but I guess I'll tell you the main one that brought me here. It was on the twenty-first of August, when I was listening to the radio in the evening before going to bed, and I heard the news that Russia had occupied Czechoslovakia. There was a lot of talk about it, some people said, 'No way.' Others said, 'Yeah, it's possible.' I wasn't very active at the time, I wasn't involved in any way in the various groups that were doing pro, con, activating anything. I considered it all with distance as political manipulation. So when the Russians came, I was surprised, I kind of thought before that it was possible that they would come, but I guess not. So I was surprised, and that was my turning point when I found out that the Russians really did come."
"When our parents returned from Cheb, after three years in Cheb, we returned to Moravia to Mohelnice. My dad brought an Opel Blitz truck and drove that Opel Blitz, he did car transport. I helped him during the holidays, loading bricks. And one day after the holidays, my dad says to me: 'Jara' or 'Jarek, come on, let's go get the money. So we arrived in front of the tractor station, which was being built at that time, which was very fashionable for the communists to build tractor stations. This was the year 49, 50 approximately. We're building a tractor station, well, my dad went to get the money and I was sitting in that car behind the wheel like a twelve year old boy, eleven, twelve years old, turning the wheel. All of a sudden a gentleman comes up and grabs me by the ear and he opens the car and he pulls me out of the car like this and he says to me in a derogatory way, I don't know the exact words so I don't want to make them up, but he said to me in a very derogatory way, 'Get out of the car and go home. And tell your mother to pray if we're going to let your dad go home.' The gentleman in the flat cap, he was looking at me like that. Well I didn't, I don't think I cried, I protested verbally. I came home, I told my mother, and my mother burst into tears and said, 'There they are, the Communists,' and I said in my mind, not knowing who they were, what the Communists were, I said in my mind, 'I swear I'll never be a Communist.'"
Jaroslav Havelka was born on 29 August 1937 in the Moravian town of Loštice. He also spent his childhood there with a small break. After graduating from the electrical engineering school in Mohelnice, he graduated from the University of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in Pilsen. The turning point for him was the August invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops, when he decided to emigrate. His first attempt failed because his girlfriend was anonymously denounced and her passport was taken away the night before she was due to leave for Yugoslavia. Jaroslav Havelka eventually made it to Switzerland in 1970 and was granted political asylum. He married in 1971 and three years later the couple had a son. Thanks to his technical education, it was not difficult for him to find work in Geneva, and for many years he worked for Caterpillar, a company that manufactured earthmoving and mining machinery. Shortly after his arrival in Switzerland, he became involved in the activities of the Beseda Slovan association and was elected its chairman in 2007. In 2018, he received the Gratias Agit award, which is given by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for spreading the good name of the Czech Republic. In 2023 he lived in Switzerland.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
