"They talked to me, but no outright pressure. They just said, 'think about it. Look, you're young, you've got your life ahead of you. You have a son.' I had my first son, he was born in '73. 'You have a child. Your wife's in education too. You should somehow...' I said, 'it's been decided, I'm fired.' 'Who dismissed you?' 'The head of the education department, Comrade Topinka.' 'Who is Topinka?' I said: 'Our head of the education department. The one in charge of education affairs in the Klatovy district.' They said: 'If you want, you can go back to school tomorrow.' The school years was in progress by then. I was no longer allowed to go to school, and I went to Klatovy in September and organised the library, as I had been tasked. Yet they said, 'go to school tomorrow!'"
"I got that [notice] saying I was supposed to come to school on the very first day of the holidays. I had already suspected something. In the morning, my former colleague, a teacher who had become an inspector, came with me on the bus from Sušice. We chatted; we were on first-name terms. Then we walked from the bus stop about half a kilometer to the school; the bus stop is in Nová Dlouhá Ves and there is Stará Dlouhá Ves. We got there. She told me to wait in the staff room. She went to the headmaster. Then the headmaster came for me and said, come with me. I went in and that's where I found out. 'Comrade Hamberger, because of your anti-socialist views and your anti-fraternal aid stance, we can't have you as a teacher in these services.' That's how I got fired."
"My mother's brother's farm was secluded, and they were obligated to turn in larger supplies of some [crops] - grain, potatoes - than the cooperative, which was in the village, about two kilometers away. He went to prison for allegedly failing to meet the supplies. There were these propaganda signs with 'Kulaks are robbing the Czech people by not delivering to them' written on them, with drawings of fat kulaks. The aunt had a little girl, six months old. She got up, took the keys, came to the dirstrict authority in Prachatice, and told them: 'Here, these are the keys. There are barns, animals, cows, two horses and a foal, and chickens, poultry. Take care of it. I won't stay there alone with a young child. I'm going back to my parents.' And uncle was back home in two days.
Jaroslav Hamberger was born in Sušice in Šumava on 2 April 1941. He came from a farmer family; his uncle Jaroslav Husinecký was imprisoned as a kulak. His father Karel Hamberger lost his job during Project 77, a communist-ordered transfer of civil servants to production. Aged 16, he experienced his first interrogation by the StB over a secret youth club led by priest Jaroslav Saller. Jaroslav had a troubled background and a bad cadre profile, yet he graduated from the Teaching Institute in Plzeň. Concerned about his future career, he consented to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He took part in protests against the occupation in Sušice in 1968, due to which he was labelled as an organiser of anti-Soviet activities. His passport was withheld in 1971. During the normalisation checks in the education system, he voiced his opposition to the Warsaw Pact troops entry and exited the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He was dismissed from his job and banned to work in education. Despite his difficult social situation, he refused the StB’s offer of collaboration. He took a worker job in a land reclamation cooperative. He passed the rehabilitation procedure in 1990 and returned to education. By 2002, he had also developed a successful civil servant career. He is an enthusiastic singer. For years, he sang with the Svatobor choir, which he helped to rebuild in Sušice together with choirmaster extraordinaire Josef Baierl.
