Martin Hekele

* 1947

  • "Sometime at the age of 49 or 50, she joined the Communist Party because she believed that it was a better future and that it would all be fixed and that everyone would start to have a good time and such a social idyll would begin. About a year or two later, her friend, the writer Václav Renč, was imprisoned, and she knew that everything that the then regime and the courts blamed him for was a lie. It was all fabricated. Maybe there were some little things, of course, but it was definitely not some malicious work and some subversion of the regime and such. He was a Catholic, that's for sure. As a Catholic and Christian, he could not be friends with the Communists. And when he was imprisoned and convicted, she left the Communist Party. And it was done. It was sometime in 1952, 1953. At that time, she worked as a chief accountant at the Vlčice paper mill, and my father, her husband, worked as a paper production manager. Basically, he also worked out from scratch. He was a trained, perhaps untrained, gardener. He worked his way up to the job as a paper manager and was employed there until 1958.

  • "I also joined the Communist Party. I'm not hiding it, even though there were times when I didn't boast about it. Sometime in 1975, 1976, when I switched to economic job position, I joined the party. At that time, I consulted it with my mother and she said, 'It will be better if you sign it and enter. To some extent, you will redeem my sins and make your life easier.‘ By no means could I have made a memory in the cooperative if I had not been a member of the Communist Party. At that time, it was still developing in such a way that I was a personnel reserve for the chief economist of the plant, even though I didn't have a university degree, but I probably could do something well at the time."

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    Zábřeh, 24.11.2020

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The end of literary hopes

Martin Hekele
Martin Hekele
zdroj: Martin Hekele

Martin Hekele was born on November 21, 1947 in Olomouc as the only child to his parents František and Žofia. He studied economics at SZTŠ Mohelnice and made a living as a zootechnician and standardizer in a unified agricultural cooperative, and after the fall of communism he worked for 18 years in various positions at the labor office as a civil servant. His mother Žofie Hekelová was a promising writer at the time. In 1944, her novel Aigen was published. This balladic, psychological story was warmly received by the readership and professional critics. Four years later, she published another novel, Ordinary Girl. However, in 1951, Žofie Hekelová resigned from the Communist Party in protest against the unjust imprisonment of the literary friend the poet Václav Renč. This was followed by persecution at work and, in essence, the impossibility of further literary activity. For political reasons, no one wanted to publish her other works. In 2020, on the occasion of Žofie Hekel‘s late hundredth birthday, a collection was published, which commemorates her literary work and life destinies. Martin Hekele also collaborated on the publication. His current effort is to commemorate the work of the almost forgotten writer and the re-publication of the novel Aigen.