Stanislav Mašek

* 1941

  • The year sixty-seven, sixty-eight, that was kind of the big release, and of course I got involved in the work. The only way to get involved was through ROH, it wasn't possible anywhere else. Within the ROH (Revolutionary Trade Union Movement) we got together a few people who were involved who didn't like the way the communist leadership was treating us, not just us, but everybody. The technical department, it was about three hundred people and most of them were engineers or high school students, there were very few communists. So it had a kind of a breeding ground where my colleagues and I put together what we wanted to change. Mainly we got into these workers' councils, which was something that worked in Yugoslavia, I don't know how it worked there, but it worked somehow. Basically, we wanted to create a workers' council in the company, which would be made up of people who were technically top of the organization, who would be a counterweight against the communist leadership. I'm not saying they were all... there were some smart communists. Well, these people got together, there were some meetings that we wanted these workers' councils. We belonged to some manufacturing economic unit, there were dozens of these enterprises that did measurement and automation, and the general manager of that VHJ came, there was a meeting in a big corridor, and he started telling us that no workers' councils, that this was not the way, that they had to run it, and at that big meeting, I was speaking there too, we said that no, if they didn't want it, we would strike."

  • "I wasn't as depressed as my friends whose parents were big communists, But I was friends with them; we didn’t worry about it. I guess it just wasn’t an issue back then, it was fine. Except when I was finishing school and I wanted to go to the chemistry school, the headmaster Tyrkas called me in and said, 'So you want to go to the chemistry school? No way, you can only go to the fertilizer plant in Čáslav, you'll have enough chemistry there.' So I shut up, I found out what, then I found out that the chemical working reserves, they take them only from the age of sixteen, so I couldn't go there either, but my gym teacher, Mr. Schwarz, when he found out all this, he knew, and he took the problem to a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee and they agreed that yes, we can let this Mašek go to school, but only to the local industrial school, so that he could be supervised. So I took the exams and I went and on the 1st of September I was waiting in that big auditorium, because I didn't know what branch I was going to take. That's where I found out that I was going to study energetics."

  • "Dad was the chief of the Sokol, and at that time, around the forty-ninth, he and several other Sokol members formed a group to help families whose breadwinners had either been arrested or had gone into exile. And on the basis of this, the group was formed to help in this way. They helped them financially or however they could. At the same time, that group grew and turned into an anti-communist resistance. Of course, in the course of time, this group was infiltrated by a certain Major Hasman, who then not perhaps directed the group, but directed it in such a way that State Security could control it and eventually arrest everybody. My father and mother left for the costume ball on 18 February 1950. Only my mother came back from the costume ball, my father was arrested at the costume ball, and my father returned to us only after ten years. Dad was sentenced to imprisonment for thirteen years, confiscation of all his property, loss of his business license, a fine of ten thousand and loss of his civil rights for ten years."

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    Praha, 13.08.2024

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His dad was taken away when he was eight years old. He didn’t come back until he was 18.

Stanislav Mašek, graduation photo, 18 years old
Stanislav Mašek, graduation photo, 18 years old
photo: Archive of the witness

Stanislav Mašek was born on 28 June 1941 in Kolín and spent his youth in Kutná Hora. His father Adolf Mašek was a chief of Sokol and a watchmaker. His mother, Růžena Mašková, née Kroupová, worked in a watchmaking shop. In February 1950, State Security arrested Adolf Mašek for financial assistance to the families of those arrested and illegal resistance activities and sentenced him to thirteen years in Jáchymov and Příbram. After his release, he worked as an electrician in the mines at Kaňk near Pardubice until his retirement. After his arrest, his mother worked for a year in the Lidka chocolate factory, then in the grain buying business until her retirement. Stanislav Mašek graduated from the Secondary Industrial School of Power Engineering, after school and military service he got a posting to Prague to the Plants of Industrial Automation, a company called Regula. In the spring of 1968 he made a critical speech to the workers and initiated the establishment of workers’ councils. In 1969 dad Adolf Mašek was acquitted, in 1971 the trial was reopened, in 1973 Adolf Mašek was retroactively sentenced to three years, and the court fully rehabilitated him in 1990. The witness worked as a designer in the field of measurement and regulation. In 1985 he joined the Interm company, which he privatised with five partners after 1989. After three and a half years, the company went bankrupt. In 2017, he rejoined Regula as deputy division manager. A year before his retirement, he left to join Inelsev, where he worked until he was seventy-seven. In 2024, he was living in Prague.