Stanislav Mašek

"I wasn't as depressed as my friends whose parents were big communists, But I was friends with them; we didn’t worry about it. I guess it just wasn’t an issue back then, it was fine. Except when I was finishing school and I wanted to go to the chemistry school, the headmaster Tyrkas called me in and said, 'So you want to go to the chemistry school? No way, you can only go to the fertilizer plant in Čáslav, you'll have enough chemistry there.' So I shut up, I found out what, then I found out that the chemical working reserves, they take them only from the age of sixteen, so I couldn't go there either, but my gym teacher, Mr. Schwarz, when he found out all this, he knew, and he took the problem to a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee and they agreed that yes, we can let this Mašek go to school, but only to the local industrial school, so that he could be supervised. So I took the exams and I went and on the 1st of September I was waiting in that big auditorium, because I didn't know what branch I was going to take. That's where I found out that I was going to study energetics."

"Dad was the chief of the Sokol, and at that time, around the forty-ninth, he and several other Sokol members formed a group to help families whose breadwinners had either been arrested or had gone into exile. And on the basis of this, the group was formed to help in this way. They helped them financially or however they could. At the same time, that group grew and turned into an anti-communist resistance. Of course, in the course of time, this group was infiltrated by a certain Major Hasman, who then not perhaps directed the group, but directed it in such a way that State Security could control it and eventually arrest everybody. My father and mother left for the costume ball on 18 February 1950. Only my mother came back from the costume ball, my father was arrested at the costume ball, and my father returned to us only after ten years. Dad was sentenced to imprisonment for thirteen years, confiscation of all his property, loss of his business license, a fine of ten thousand and loss of his civil rights for ten years."