“The trial was in summer, it was very hot, and 42 persons were tried. The judge declared that Vavřínek was sentenced to death penalty, and when I raised my hand, they only told me to sit down and proceeded to the next person. The trial looked like this, and it lasted for two days. I was under the death penalty until Christmas. My mother then arranged for a lawyer, and somehow they managed to deal with all this and settle it. My sentence was then commuted to only three and a half years. He earned quite a lot of money on it. One session with this lawyer cost sixty thousand Crowns.”
“A new era of my life started. At that time, I was studying the trade academy, which I fortunately completed in 1948 in Pilsen. We did not like the situation that was established here after the Victorious February in 1948. We thus had a word with Jarek Svoboda and we decided we would try publishing some written materials which would raise the people. These pamphlets were called Voices of the Silenced. The police obviously discovered it shortly after, about a year later. Svoboda knew that they were already after him, and he quickly left the country, but I didn’t suspect anything. They came for me at night on May 22, 1949.”
“The roots of this reach all the way back to 1945. When the Americans liberated Pilsen, everyone expected that things would be just great from then on, but all of a sudden, you could hear from the radio: ´The Red Pilsen is speaking.´ It was something terrible, it felt as if somebody was rubbing your back with a steel brush. It was a disappointment, certainly. But nothing could be done about it; there were quite a lot of bribed people who would carry it further.”
“My brother did a summer job in Čemíny near Pilsen, and a tractor was coming down the road and it tripped over him. My brother was still alive. A car passed by, a Tatra 603, and they quickly made the car stop and asked them: ´Please, take the boy to the hospital, or he will bleed to death.´ But what a surprise, the woman sitting in the car was the sister of Fučík. When she saw the boy, she retorted: ´You think I would get my new car stained?´ and she left. We just let it be, but other people sued her, and there was a court trial in Pilsen for her failure to provide first aid, and she was fined 500 Crowns. That was it.”
photo: foto studenti při projektu Příběhy našich sousedů
photo: foto studenti při projektu Příběhy našich sousedů
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Ing. Karel Vavřínek was born August 20, 1929 in Pilsen as the eldest of three sons in a well-to-do family. His father was an entrepreneur who ran businesses in several fields and who owned several properties and shops in Pilsen. His mother was a housewife. Karel, who has been an active Boy Scout and a member of Sokol since he was a young boy, completed his studies at the trade academy in Pilsen in 1948. Disgusted with the situation after February 1948, he and several of his friends began issuing anti-communist pamphlets called Voices of the Silenced. In May 1949 he and one more member of the group were arrested, investigated and sentenced in a group trial in Bratislava to death penalty, which was later commuted to 3,5 years of imprisonment. He served his sentence in Leopoldov and later in Jáchymov, where he worked in the Bratrství mine until his release in 1952. Then he spent one more year working in Jáchymov as a part-time land surveyor. Both of his parents were also imprisoned based on false conviction, and their property was confiscated. Karel graduated from the Czech Technical University in Prague and worked in the chemical industry. He was rehabilitated in 1970. He lives in Prague and works on the publication of the Almanac of Czech Aristocratic Families.
