"It's interesting that my father foresaw it a bit. My mother said that she and her brother were in Sezimovo Ústí and my father was listening to the BBC. Once he was tuning into the BBC and found Moscow there. He listened to Moscow for a while and declared that the Russians would invade us. That what he heard there was a clear ideological preparation for armed intervention. So, he knew about three weeks in advance that it was coming. I certainly had no idea.”
"There was prosecutor Adamová, who had a two-year law degree from the 1950s, when they forced workers to go to school and turned them into lawyers within two years. She took me there as part of the fact that I should see the court and that someone was being taken into custody. I had no idea who it was. And suddenly I found out that it was Jirous. He had been released from prison a few days earlier. He was supposed to interrupt a concert by discussing a song lyrics with some female singer and something else about a Mercedes with a western brand was discussed there. I was very struck by the contrast between Jirous, who seemed very educated and cultured, and Dr. Adamová, who had learned a few legal phrases. Dr. Adamová asked him what he did for a living, he said that he was writing a monograph about a German expressionist painter. When Dr. Adamová asked if someone would publish it for him, he replied how should he know if he hadn't written it yet. I thought it was elegant to point out the absurdity of the situation in this way.'
"We arrived very early, already in 1951, because my father's brother was arrested for treason and in 1954 he got twenty years. A traitor's brother could not be an ambassador. His name was Eduard Outrata. He was the Minister of Finance in the first government in exile, then somehow he did not get along with Beneš and after the war, he made a two-year plan to restore the economy. The Communists accused him of deliberately underestimating the results that our industry could achieve, thereby damaging our state, as was the case in those processes. He got twenty years, but was released because he suffered from a heart defect. They were afraid that he would die in prison, and in 1955 things were no longer so rigid. My father brought him medicine for his heart disease from America, but they refused to give it to him in prison."
“When they arrested my father's brother Eduard, both parents saw that it was completely wrong. They saw the workings of the regime and began to change their minds. Even when we were very young, our parents tried to teach us Russian, even before we had Russian in school. But somehow it didn't work out and they let it go. Of course, they were expelled from the party in 1951. Then around 1960, when they rehabilitated the uncle, they took them back again. In 1968, my father wrote a legal treatise on international law about what occupation was, and it was absolutely clear. So my mother was expelled for the second time in 1969. My father was already sick with leukemia. They did not invite him to the checks because they knew he would answer that it was an occupation and that he did not agree with it. I think they knew he was going to die. Leukemia was then an incurable disease. They let time work it out. Otherwise, they would undoubtedly exclude him too.”
"We went to the Yalta cinema to see the movie Smrt v červeném jaguáru (Death in a red Jaguar), and in the meantime it happened. When we went to the cinema, there were some people at the statue of St. Wenceslav, there was a cordon of police at the top, maybe even some armoured personnel carriers. We stayed in the cinema because the projector broke and the repairman couldn't get there, the police didn't want to let him go to St. Wenceslas’s square. In the end, he somehow made his way there. So, the movie went on. Then the police pushed people down to Wenceslas’s and some ran into the passageways. The cinema had poor ventilation, so the cinema was ventilated directly from the passages. Some policeman threw a tear gas grenade there. Flashes of blood began to appear in front of our eyes, and most people began to run away from the cinema in silent horror. They just ran into the policemen and they beat them up. We lay down under the seats. I don't know if any policemen looked in there or not, but when it all died down, all we could hear was the sound of the film running on. So, after about ten minutes we climbed out, sat down, and there were about five of us left in the cinema."
Matěj Outrata was born on October 29, 1949 in Washington, where at that time his father JUDr. Vladimír Outrata worked as an ambassador. In 1951, he was fired from the post of ambassador and the family returned to Czechoslovakia. His father taught at the law school, his mother was a translator from French and English. His mother Eva Outratová came from a family of academic painter Ludvík Strimpl, who lived in Paris, and it is said that at the beginning of the First World War he met two important state-makers Milan Štefánik and Edvard Beneš. During the war, his parents lived in France, England and from 1941 in the Soviet Union, where Vladimír Outrata was sent on a diplomatic mission. After the war, his parents joined the Communist Party. His father worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1947, he joined the Political and Social University as a professor. From 1948 until his dismissal in 1951, he served as ambassador in the USA. According to the witness, the reason for the appeal was the arrest of his father‘s brother Eduard Outrata, the former exiled finance minister, who was sentenced to 12 years in 1954 in a Kangaroo court for treason and sabotage. The parents of the witness were expelled from the Communist Party. They changed their opinion on the party, but did not reject it. In 1963, after the rehabilitation of the uncle, they were accepted into the party again at their own request. Matěj Outrata graduated from a secondary grammar school and was admitted to the Faculty of Law at the Charles University. He experienced the situation at the school in the crisis years of 1968, 1969 and the occupation strike. He took the self-immolation of Jan Palach very seriously. On the anniversary of the August occupation in 1969, he experienced a spontaneous demonstration on St. Wenceslas Square, during which someone attacked the Yalta cinema full of people with tear gas. He describes his participation in the celebrations of the victory of the Czechoslovakia over the USSR at the World Hockey Championship in 1969. After graduating from the law school in January 1975, he got married and in autumn, he had to enlist to basic military service for two years, because he had studied university a year longer. He worked at the prosecutor‘s office as a candidate, but was not satisfied with the level of judges and the prosecutor‘s office and decided not to pursue criminal law. From 1980, he worked as a corporate lawyer at the General Directorate of Food Trade. In June 1989, he was admitted to federal arbitration in the Legislative Department, despite not being a party member. After the revolution, he joined the government legislature, but after a few months, he left of his own accord. In the 1990s, he established a legal consultancy business, then devoted himself to privatization projects for large enterprises. He had an entrepreneurial spirit. In the mid-1990s, he changed his field of activity and ran a sawmill with a friend, also bought a pallet factory, and had a store with outdoor equipment, ammunition and weapons. In the late 1990s he was admitted to the Czech Bar association and then worked as an independent lawyer.
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!
