"My only message to today's young people to guard democracy. It's a very fragile thing and I wish no one to ever experience what we did on total deployment and during the war in the Protectorate. And, after all, during those forty years of communist rule; while perhaps not so harsh, it was still unpleasant. With that said, I think living in the 'progress and peace camp' as it was called then was not as devastating or escalated as under the Nazis. Guard democracy!"
"We came to the camp, and the arrival was already quite unpleasant because it was in early November. We saw a few people there, mostly dirty, ragged, and we saw these simple barracks, almost the same as in a concentration camp. Just a plank wall, not reinforced in any way. No thermal insulation like a double wooden wall with insulation in between, not at all. Just wooden board barracks, and the space that we lived in was seven by nine meters and there were eighteen of us. Bunk beds, of course. There were these tiny little lockers in between, a big table and two long benches and a stove. Fortunately, there were mines for some pretty bad coal, kind of between brown and black coal, not far from there. We were able to get some heat in there. We lit the fire when we came in from our shift. So, from about eight o'clock to, say, ten to eleven or midnight, it was warm and the stove was burning. Then everybody fell asleep and in the morning the blankets froze to our chins because the wind was blowing through."
"The vetting took until 1970 or so, when I left my director position and was told first of all that I should go work manually for everything that I had caused: firstly, my dealings with imperialists, secondly, that I didn't convince anyone at work that this was not an invasion but brotherly help, and third, in particular, that I had sent the letter [to friendly institutes]. It was also signed by the local Communist Party organization and the unions, so it wasn't just the leadership that signed it. There were all sorts of other things, I don't even remember what they accused me of. It didn't happen eventually; I didn't have to leave the institute but stayed on board as rank-and-file researcher. I have the impression that it was on the intercession of the then deputy minister, Otakar Ferfecký, whom was in favour with the party. He was a very good organiser and did several jobs for him which he valued quite highly. So I was able to stay in that institute."
"Well, in the meantime, I experienced all sorts of unpleasant things, one of which I remember now. Once I went from Svitavy to Brno to see a girl I was dating at the time. We sat down at the museum for a long chat, it was in the winter, sometime in December 1944. There were these cubicles with a table and benches all around, and they were blocked by a rather high wooden wall, so you couldn't see who was sitting opposite or next to you. As we were talking, she naturally asked me about the total deployment as well. Suddenly the guy in front of us jumped up and said, 'What are you saying? Don't you know that the enemy is listening?' He called a soldier and said, 'Now you guard these two here for me, I'll take care of business in town and then we'll lock them up.' And about an hour and a half later he came back. He was twinkling his eyes and telling us, 'You can be glad I have to leave and I don't have time for this. Get out of here!' So we were lucky then. But there were more moments like that."
"My final certificate was mediocre. I enrolled at the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering of the Brno University of Technology and started studying in October 1939. My studies didn't last very long, as colleges were closed on 17 November. I remember keenly coming to the old school building in Kounicova street that day and there was, of course, a soldier with a rifle already standing at the entrance and the building was already taken or was being taken by German soldiers. Students were gathering across the street on the property where the Faculty of Law ís now stands; lots of them. Of course, they were not happy about the state of affairs. They shouted at the German soldiers while a few teachers were trying to calm us down and advised us to disperse. Of course, people of twenty-five years of age are full of vigour, so we listened to the good advice, but in the end - I think after nine o'clock or so - the whole crowd of students from all kinds of faculties, architecture, chemistry, civil engineering, engineering faculty and so on - students from all those faculties just... There could have been at least a thousand of us. We gathered and walked down Veveří Street into town. We were shouting, singing folk songs, and I think even the national anthem, shouting all kinds of slogans. When the crowd arrived at today's Moravské náměstí (Moravian Square), about at the Kounic Palace, where our university canteen was then, there were already green police trucks by Kounic Palace, and they were already loading students into these trucks. As a complete freshman who had only been there for a few weeks, I marched on, shouting slogans courageously, and then fortunately one of my older friends pulled me out of the crowd almost right in front of the trucks. I actually escaped arrest. Those people were then locked up for several months, some for a year or a year and a half, before they were let back in. We were told the schools would remain closed for three years."
Vladimír Matoušek was born in Jaroměřice near Jevíčko on 28 April 1921. He completed primary school in Jevíčko and the first stage of grammar school, from which he transferred to a high school. His studies at the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering in Brno were interrupted by the closure of Czech universities on 17 November 1939. He was totally deployed to the Donawitz Ironworks in Styria in 1943, where he worked until 1944. He spent the end of the war in Svitavy as a construction technician and worked briefly as a translator for the national committee in Jevíčko. After the liberation, he returned to study architecture in Brno, then joined the urban planning department of Stavoprojekt in Brno and then moved to the newly established Institute of Urban Planning where he eventually took over the director position. He got married in 1955 and his son Vladimír was born a year later. In 1966 he took the position of director of the Brno branch of the Research Institute of Construction and Architecture. He earned the Candidate of Technical Sciences title, but was removed from his senior position over signing The Two Thousand Words and speaking up against the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops. He worked in a rank-and-file position until retirement in the 1980s. After the fall of the communist regime, he took the job as an external lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture of the Brno University of Technology.
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!
