"Because the communists knew how to take advantage of all poor people. They told them that they would take money from the rich and give it to the poor. That's a great idea and everyone likes it. All capitalists gone. But I was not interested in politics. I just remember that Rudolf Slánský once walked within this little crowd towards the station in Blatná."
"Was the State Security interested in you?" - "No, not at all. They were interested at the very beginning. They came to see me twice. There were two of them, one of them was called Černý. One was nice, and one was bad, like in detective stories. This happened at the very beginning, when I joined the research institute. When I had only been there for a few months. Maybe it was after I returned from my military service, or maybe before, I’m not sure. They asked me about this one person, I can no longer remember his name. I told them that I used to go see him to get technical literature. He was a great man, that engineer. I had nothing to say to them. They told me to write it down. So I told them that we would discuss an oxygen converter. So I wrote it down and gave it to them..."
"We were organising the local Civic Forum. A vote was taken on who would be the speaker. The biggest problem was that the spokesperson of Civic Forum was a very strange person. He still wanted to be the spokesperson and we didn't want to elect him. We kept arguing and I don't even know how it ended.'
"My dad once told me, 'Look, take your backpack, go to the park, and when you see a group of little tiny trees coming out of a big tree stump, you'll find a paper box there. Put it in your rucksack and come back.' He was there with some black marketeer who led him to this warehouse, where dad grabbed a box of margarine. He ran out into the garden with the box and threw it over the fence and it landed next to those three tree stumps. There were about twenty cubes of margarine and that was quite something. I remember I used to go to the merchant Marun and he would give us five dekagrams of butter a month. Butter! You had to get everything with special tickets. Dad smoked all his life and I used to go to the main square, later to the station, to get him his tobacco with a special ticket. There was this shed and that’s where it was handed out."
"In 1945, my father was running around Blatná looking for Germans. He would then lead them in processions. They all had to have a white marking. We watched open-mouthed. There were still some collaborators in Blatná. I still remember this tanner, Barák, who was given a sign saying 'Barák, Barák, you will hang on a hook’ (this rhymes in Czech). There was a shop on the square selling fish hooks, it was owned by a certain Viktora, who was also a collaborator, but we had no idea what it all meant. We ran to the square and there we saw a guy climbing a ladder and smashing a sign that was written on a glass panel. He was smashing it with his fist...”
Rudolf Štrobl was born on January 30, 1934 in Luby near Cheb. His father Rudolf came from a poor mining family in Ledvice by Duchcov and for most of his life he worked as railway worker. His mother Věra was a housewife. Rudolf had two younger sisters, Ludmila and Věra, who were born during the war. While his father defended the Czechoslovak border as part of the State Defense Guard (abbreviated SOS in Czech) from May to October 1938, the four-year-old Rudolf and his mother fled in a goods train full of coal from Luby near Cheb, which had been taken over by the Germans after the Munich Agreement. The family lost all their property and started anew in Blatná, where his father got a job. From February 1944, his father had to hide from the Gestapo. At the end of the war he returned to Blatná and took part in the liberation movements. In 1945, he joined the Communist Party. After the war, the family moved to Teplice, where Rudolf graduated from grammar school. Following his father’s example, he believed the Party, but he reconsidered his political views during his studies at the Mining College. In 1957, as a newly appointed engineer, he was assigned to work in Prague at the Metallurgical Research Institute. He devoted his free time to music and he also served as interpreter for French tourists in Prague, and later also on packaged holidays in France. In the years 1964 – 1966, the State Security (StB) tried to use him. He was considered a lead candidate for possible cooperation, but the recruitment efforts failed due to the lack of collaboration on the side of Rudolf Štrobl. In the 1960s, he married Jana Těžká. A part of her family, called Dundrovi, had their house U tří pštrosů (At the Three Ostriches) next to the Charles Bridge confiscated by the Communists. Rudolf Štrobl witnessed shooting at the National Museum during the invasion by the armed troops of the Warsaw Pact. In 1968, the Štrobls had the opportunity to emigrate from France to Canada, but at the last minute they changed their minds. In 1984, Rudolf Štrobl was offered the opportunity to move to Algeria with his family for a job for six years, but this was only under the condition that he become a member of the Communist Party. He experienced the November 1989 revolution from afar in Algeria, where he and his colleagues even founded a branch of the Civic Forum. After returning to Czechoslovakia in 1991, there was no work for him in the research institute. He decided to go into business in the nineties. He founded the Feralloy Manufacturing Association that produced machinable steel, which was sold off to all the iron and steel works. He has six patents, two of which have been put into practice. He and his wife raised a daughter, Karina, and in 2017 he became a widower.
