"In 1948 we had to start selling some things in order to make ends meet. I was receiving an allowance for orphans, and in 1953 the comrades withdrew it. I was not allowed to take this allowance because I was not eighteen yet, but they were allowed to take it away from me. I grew up moneyless, I couldn't study, and therefore I joined the army. Another reason for this was that I wanted to protect my uncle from imprisonment, since they were always trying to find some problems with the capitalists and send them to uranium mines and so on. And thus I applied so that they would leave my family alone."
"Patriotism is a duty for every citizen, and so is the relation to his or her country. When the Czech Republic was occupied, all the citizens had the obligation to join in the struggle somehow. It was not a matter of whether they should or should not. Had they done nothing at all, we all might be living somewhere in Siberia now, in a dug-out cottage. Perhaps you wouldn't even own it, you would just have one corner of this cottage, and perhaps you would even like it. Patriotism has become lost today, and people don't know what it is. When I was a little boy and the national anthem was played, all stood attention. The upbringing was different then. Today, we miss the moral ethics, the politeness – like people greeting each other and having some kind of relationship among each other. Now, money comes first, and everything else only comes after."
"When I was in the army, they were afraid to let me join the Party because they didn’t know whether the assassination was a good thing or a bad thing. One year it was this way, the following year the other way, and the opinions of the politicians were constantly changing. In 1968 when the Russian army arrived from Germany, the officer for Political Affairs shouted: ´Comrades, you cannot shout here like this. You don't even know what opinion you will hold tomorrow!´"
"Humankind is a group of people, and in order to keep it together, it needs to be given an ideology. This is what the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes said. He said that to keep them together, we need to give them religion, communism or fascism. Fascism and communism are anti-society ideologies. That means that every honest man should either oppose the ideology, or ignore it. In order to understand why the Heydrich terror took place in our country, when fascism was spread in Germany and worldwide, all should somehow rise against fascism. In our country, this opposition was intensified by the fact that Czechoslovakia was occupied, and that Heydrich had only one task – to exterminate the Czech nation. He was supposed to drive the lower-class, the working-class, away to Siberia. He said that Siberia was quite pretty and that people would like it. The educated class was to be either Germanized, or shot. But he would never put the ordinary people and the educated class together because the common trait of the Czech nation is such that if you bend it, it will get up straight again. He thus began with their extermination."
photo: současná foto A. Jelínková, dobová archiv pamětníka
photo: současná foto A. Jelínková, dobová archiv pamětníka
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Mr. Miroslav Sívek was born April 20, 1939 in the village of Střelná in the Moravian Wallachia region. His mother was the sister of Josef Valčík, the soldier and paratrooper from group Silver A. His father worked as a saddle-maker. There were two sons and a daughter in the family. Both their parents were arrested in June 1942 during the terror which followed Heydrich’s assassination. The father was executed, and Mrs. Sívková, who was pregnant with their fourth child at the time, was deported to Mauthausen in October 1942 after giving birth to the baby, and then executed there in early 1943. The relatives took care of the children, and Miroslav lived with the family of his father’s parents until the summer 1945. As a war orphan, he was then adopted by a family friend, who owned a saw-mill in nearby Lidečko. Miroslav Sívek graduated from a military academy and he has worked for the military his entire life. His hobbies include history and sport shooting. He now lives in Chýnice near Prague. Died in APril 2016.
