Jaroslav Toufar

“Political vetting began in 1970 and we got expelled from the party. In Fatra, this process had an interesting course of events. The colleagues who did not have university education and were considered to be disloyal were demoted from technical job positions to manual labor. Those of us who had university education were punished by a steep cut in wages. The former company director Mika probably saved us from manual labor when he said that we owed a debt (for our education) to the working class.”

“The Civic Forum chapter at Fatra in Napajedla was started by the technical department. An interesting point was that I nearly ended up like Lenin during the Great October Socialist Revolution because I spoke from atop of an agricultural tractor trailer. Students arrived at the Fatra plant and told us what’s coming. So a hard-line communist, and a scoundrel, climbed on top of the trailer and started to organize the revolution at Fatra. This made me really mad. So I also climbed on top of the trailer and said: ‘Wake up people, are you going to do this with someone who fed you the party line for the past twenty years.’ Huge applause followed. My career picked up after this point and I was promoted to technical director in 1990.”