Eduard Vacek

“Firstly, I needed to come to terms with the history of my ancestors who were all communists. Unfortunately I cannot meet them, because all of them died, so I am not able to tell them that they were all wrong. And so at least I tried to rectify what they have unknowingly caused by having started it. Not that they have actively participated in something evil, but due to ignorance, out of faith and illusions they started that process. The worst people eventually got to power, people who were never supposed to be there. Those original idealists would have never agreed with their assuming power. Throughout my entire life, I was personally experiencing the discrediting of the idea of socialism and communism. Basically, this happens to every idealistic thought which appears. It happened to Christianity as well. This process constantly repeats itself. It is a composition of frustration: an element of expectations, disappointment and being pissed off. This cutting edge still keeps going forward, nothing is fulfilled, nothing is put into practice, because it is replaced by something else, something new. I needed to come to terms with this wave. The fact that my great-grandfather who was a senator for Social Democratic Party, had accepted the idea of communism, had devaluated the idea of social democracy to me. My other relatives were already the bearers of ideas, the elements of it. It came to me and I have finished with it. I had difficult discussions, at first with my father, later with my other relatives as well, and I found out that those people would not let have themselves get persuaded. I needed to tackle the problem actively. To diminish the strength and space of this evil which assumed an ideological role. That was my inner motivation.”

“I established a magazine called Czech Prison Service and I needed a good editorial committee. Where else could I get it than to invite the former committee of the Czech National Council for the Penal Service? I started publishing a magazine which had an amazing level of quality. After seven years, the Institute for Criminology and Social Prevention conducted an assessment of European magazines for prison service and my magazine was evaluated as the best one. I had a special method. I brought up some topic important to prisons to the group of people who were then to discuss it and I was recording the whole debate. It was like a game of cards, with all of them playing trumps. I recorded it, I wrote it down and I sent it to them again. I always told them: ‘It does not mater at all what is said here, but what the final effect will be.’ This process was repeated there times. Eventually they all started reacting to what the others have said, and a problem cleared up, and only the distilled core of the issue remained and we published it in the Czech Prison Service. All prison directors and the main staff all received a copy of the magazine, and they began following it. At the time when I was still a deputy to the Czech National Council, a wave of resistance against me ensued from the former Stalinists, proponents of the Soviet model. The greatest resistance was in Pilsen-Bory. We conducted a session of the prison committee in the prison in Pilsen-Bory. I invited the whole management and the opponents who were against us. They were all sitting there, gloomy, with stubborn faces, and I asked them to raise their objections and I said that we would try to deal with them. Nobody said a word, and they basically did not have any ground. I knew what those issues were and so I addressed them myself in the second round and the whole prison committee discussed it with them. Then some of them joined in the discussion and we basically broke their resistance. Four or five of the worst places where the director general was not able to put our ideas into practice. Eventually our magazine began to be important for them.”