"When the first draft of the first charter of Civic Democratic Party, I missed even the most cursory remark that we are a party built on Christian values. Mr. Klaus however considered Christianity a curse word by that time. In the inner circle of the committee, there was only Tomáš Kopřiva who would be able to support something like this. Maybe I should have paid more attention then. There was some larger celebration going on in the Břevnov monastery and it was only me and Kopřiva who went there as there were no other people in the executive word who could cobble the Father's Prayer together. The longer I was in the party, the more I felt the prejudice towards Christianity."
"When I sat in the Czech Czech National Council, I would go to Prague every Monday morning and I had two suitcases. One contained various papers from the parliament, one was full of clean underwear and shirts. We would stay overnight in different places every day. I was told at the end of the meeting where to go and I took those suitcases and went by metro or by tram to some hotel where lodging was booked. One day, I sat on a double bed and another member of parliament entered. I looked at him and it was Jirka Machalik, the chairman of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. We would share a double room maybe three times and I would find out about my roommate only when I met him. I thought to myself, what should I do? Do I kill him? It's nonsense, he was elected and it needed to be respected."
“The last time I visited Germany with my mother, I was around 15. My pocket money for the trip was 20 German marks when a hot dog at the railway station would cost about five. Our relatives were not that bad off not to care about us. It was me who had issues with being given things. I refused to be a beggar. At the end, I did not go there for years and broke the contact with them. After mom's death, they were not direct relatives any more so it would be much more difficult to go there. So I visited them only after the revolution, in 1990.”
„Father used to say that it was unlikely that I would be admitted to a high school and that I would need to go to a trade school even though I had excellent grades. We thought that I might apply to an army academy which was a possibility how to bypass the problem. So, one day Colonel Prochazka from Zerovice came to visit, he had been dad's classmate. Mom was crying and kept walking away from the room while dad and colonel told me about the application proposal. There was a clause that we would have to stop any contact with our relatives in West Germany. I said that those people were the same relatives as those who live in Czechoslovakia and that they didn't do any bad to me. I thus refused the offer and the story of my encounter with army school ended. This encounter made me think, though, and a few years later, after five or six conscriptions I got the coveted certificate of Unfit for Service. But it was not easy.”
Oldřich Váca was born on the 18th of October in Sokolov. During his early childhood, he lived in Chlum sv. Máří (then renamed Chlum nad Ohří). His mother, Magdalena (maiden name Scherbaumová) was from a family of Sudeten Germans, his father‘s ancestry was Czech. Since childhood, Oldřich was aware of the Catholic faith which was personified by the Baroque chuch built by Kilian Ignaz Dietzenhofer. Another edifice by the same architect is to be found in a village of Skočice near Plzeň where the Váca family moved in 1962. The family history limited Oldřich‘s possibilities in choosing what field of higher education to pursue – he graduated from a trade school in Stará Turá near Trenčín as a medical instruments technician. After graduating, he did not work in the field for too long, he started working for the Czechoslovak Railways as a signalman in Lužany. During the eighties, he managed a local amateur theatre group and became one of the most prominent personalities of community life. This helped him during the Velvet Revolution, at the end of 1989 when starting a local organisation of the Civic Forum in Přestice. In the frst free elections, he was elected to the Czech National Council. He participated not only in establishing the Interparliamentary Club of the Democratic Right but also in founding the Civic Democratic Party, in whose executive board he sat. His second term was for the CDP in the Parliament of the Czech Republic. He left the top politics in 1996 and started working in a PR agency, later on he traded in dietary supplements. In the years 2002 and 2010, he ran for an office in the local council of Přeštice. Oldřich Váca died in 2021.
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!
