"Václav Klaus was a demanding boss. He came to meetings prepared and, strangely enough, liked to have partners for discussion, not just obedient 'nodders'. As soon as a man allowed himself to be backed into a corner, he would destroy him."
"Restitution was a process that responded to the mood in society. At the same time it was a process that the authors of the economic reform scenario never counted on; even the leading economists Václav Klaus, Vladimír Dlouhý and Tomáš Ježek, were against it. They said it would make privatisation more difficult and pose new unexpected problems. Even some student leaders in the Federal Assembly opposed this. There was quite a fuss about it. Finally, the idea prevailed that if things are prepared with prudence, restitution will not be an obstacle to privatisation but an important complement to it. The property will change hands from the state to the owners or their heirs from one day to the next, and it will be up to them to take care of it."
"The decisive impulse was a message from my son. A week before the general strike, we wouldn't meet at home at all. We wrote notes and posted them on the mirror or left them on the table. My wife was on the strike committee of the Alfa Theatre, I was in Obroda. One night, I came home from a meeting and found a note from my son: 'Dad, I'm a member of the strike committee and I took the car'. Sure, youth forward, but he hadn't thought that Dad could use a car for his activities too. Then I found a second piece of paper from him on Sunday night: 'Dad, if you at Škoda don't support us students, they'll trample us.' I came to work, called people together and told them: 'If it's played so that there are militiamen in the streets and people face them, it should be us rather than our children.'"
"Looking back, it's strange to me what we were able to take in. It was a period when the comrades were allowing left-wing philosophy leaders to speak in Prague. Jean-Paul Sartre gave a lecture at the Faculty of Arts, and it was packed, people sitting all over the place. Those who couldn't get in at least stood on the stairs. If I were to say what it was about today, I wouldn't be able to quote. But to me, it was about the fact that the human spirit should not be limited by anything and should also venture in unlikely directions because every direction explored leads to the enrichment of man in general."
"The contagiousness of being able to see something different, talk about something different and breathe something different led me to join the Communist Party along with my classmates who had joined Škoda after college with me. I was led by ideals and an atmosphere that eventually resulted in the revival process of 1968. To illustrate the atmosphere, there was a writers' congress at that time which not only criticised but also showed a direction for the future. We joined the party knowing that if we didn't like football the way it was played, it wasn't enough to just buy a ticket to watch. You had to put on your shorts and go and kick the ball."
Jaroslav Jurečka was born in Vsetín on 10 February 1943. His father Jaroslav was in the first generation of employees of Zbrojovka Vsetín, and together with mother Marie they were active in the Czech Tourist Club, tennis club and Sokol gymnastics club. They participated in the 11th All-Sokol Convention in Prague; some of the Sokols protested against the communist coup. Having completed high school, he was choosing between studying the piano and reactor physics, eventually opting for the Faculty of Technical and Nuclear Physics of the Czech Technical University in Prague. The 1960s atmosphere during his studies in Prague engulfed him. He recalls hearing a lecture by Jean-Paul Sartre and taking part in the preparation of the 1965 student may feast at which the American beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg was elected its king. After university, he joined the nuclear engineering plant of the Plzeň Škoda factory (then V. I. Lenin Works). He joined the Communist Party in 1967 hoping to change society for the better. He was expelled from the Party in 1970 but did not lose his job, although he had to come to terms with the fact that his salary would freeze and he would not be allowed to attend conferences abroad. The StB took an interest in him because of his contacts with Jan Thoma, a former Škoda colleague who signed Charter 77 later on and was imprisoned for a year in the 1970s for anti-state activities. Although he did not sign Charter 77, he had a part in the input for the Charter document regarding the safety of nuclear power plant operations in the Czechoslovakia. From the spring of 1989 on, he was active in the Obroda Club for Socialist Reconstruction. In November 1989, he was one of the organisers of the general strike at the Nuclear Power Plant of the Plzeň Škoda Plant, and he was one of the two spokesmen for the coordination centre of the Škoda Plant Civic Forum from December 1989. In 1990, he was elected a member of the House of the People of the Federal Assembly on behalf of the Civic Forum and became the deputy chairman of the Planning and Budget Committee. He was, among other things, the rapporteur for the law on mass-scale privatisation. In 1991-1992, he was deputy to the Federal Minister of Finance, Václav Klaus, and was in charge of the voucher privatisation and takeover of the Communist Party and Socialist Youth Union assets. In the latter half of 1992, he served as the First Deputy Minister at the Federal Ministry of Economy. From January 1993 to June 1996, he was Deputy Minister for National Property Management and Privatisation. He then briefly served as an advisor to Finance Minister Ivan Kočárnik and was elected senator in October 1996. From 1998 to 2000 he served as chairman of the regional ODS association of the West Bohemia and then the Plzeň region. In 2004-2007 he was the chief manager of ODS. From 1999 to 2004 he was Chairman of the Board of Directors and Director of Faktoring KB, a subsidiary of Komerční banka. Between 2007 and 2009, he served as Vice-Rector for Development of Karel Engliš University in Brno.
