"That was in high school, we had this one professor. I'm not going to name her or her nickname. It wasn't civics as it was written, it was political brainwashing. So, she was telling us that while our comrades were bleeding on the battlefield, there were those among us and so on. Of course, I had to take it personally. I was one of them while our comrades were bleeding. But I knew how it was. Having always been a bit of a mute and a rebel, I took the liberty to speak up. She asked me what I wanted. I said, 'Comrade professor, I think that if a mother's son falls in the war, it doesn't matter whether she is French, Russian, or German.' She said it was provocative, and I had to go to the headmaster's office. I got a reduced conduct grade plus a headmaster's reprimand."
I was sitting at the table at home, my mother was doing something in the kitchen, I was doing my homework, and my father came home from the shop in the evening and said, 'Mom, make me some coffee. I think we have a problem.' She made him a coffee and said, 'What is it?' I heard it because I was sitting at the same table. 'Look, this came to me, a registered letter. Now he quoted it, 'Dear Sir, we request you to voluntarily surrender your business to the municipal corporation and enter there within three days, or close the business within the same day and, to put it simply, find work elsewhere.'' Dad was sitting over it, and Mum was wiping her tears, and Dad was reading the letter over and over again, and suddenly he said, 'Wait a minute, Mum, but this isn't a ministerial decree or a section or a law, I'm being asked here. But since it's a request, I may or may not comply. Nothing, Mom, we're moving on from Monday.' Mom was scared it would become an issue. Dad said, 'At the most, they can close my business, and they'd do that anyway.' And they continued for another two and a half years, and he didn't respond to the letter. But this is what I remember vividly from childhood - that he said if somebody requests me, I don't have to comply. And they continued for over two years in private business."
"There used to be a clerk there, he was German, and he used to visit my mother. He fancied her. It came to the point that my mother didn't want him, so she found herself a Czech and even married him. That was a problem. He became the leader of the Sudeten German party and took revenge on my mother and father. They broke his shop window, put excrement in it and wrote "Czech swine, Czech dog" on it. The apprentice who was supposed to prepare the place came. We lived a few houses away from the shop. - My father came out, and he saw what was there. And since he was a peculiar type of person - there was a wooden newsagent's shop opposite where newspapers and cigarettes were bought from the morning, and he went there and bought two little flags of the Sudeten German party and stuck them in the excrement. At that moment, the municipal police officer was there: 'Herr Pátek, what kind of provocation is this?' The father replied that he was only identifying the perpetrator."
Jaroslav Pátek was born on 11 September 1938 in Hustopeče. He came from an ethnically mixed family, his father was Czech and his mother Austrian German. He spent his childhood mainly with his German grandparents on the border of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the annexed territory of the Third Reich in the village of Starovice. His three uncles on his mother‘s side died in the war, the fourth of them deserted. Jaroslav‘s grandfather was imprisoned for the desertion of his youngest son. His paternal uncle had to flee from the Gestapo at the beginning of World War II for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. He managed to escape to the Netherlands, where he married a Dutch woman in order to obtain citizenship and not be deported back to the Protectorate. His father opened a successful hairdressing salon in Pardubice, frequented by the East Bohemian Theatre stars. After the communist coup, political officials tried to liquidate every businessman. After graduating from high school, he was banned from all universities. After that, he changed several jobs. He repeatedly refused to join the Communist Party (KSČ). He was very fond of music, had his own band MASAKR, and learned to play several musical instruments. During the last regime, he repeatedly managed to get illegally to Vienna to visit his uncle. After the Velvet Revolution, he also visited his relatives in the USA. Jaroslav Pátek died on 29 February 2024 at the age of 85.
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!
