Professor, Ing., CSc. Jaroslav Kopáček

“There was mud all around and one needed rubber boots to wade through that because some twenty or thirty metres from the construction site, there was the so-called concrete plant. You can imagine the mess when they would bring loads of concrete to the construction site. Our main piece of equipment was the so-called grey plague. Those were rubber boots which reached just above the ankles, they were made in ladies’ and gentlemen’s versions, all in rubber, with a zipper. People usually wore indoor slippers insode them. I would put them on and walk in those rubber boots through the mud to the bus stop, then I’d ride the bus to the theatre at the Smetanovo Square in Ostrava. At the back there, there was a bus station. When I came to school, all muddy, I went to the classroom and rinsed the rubber boots in the wash basin, then I put them again over the slippers and I wore this until I left for home. That’s what was called ‘grey plague’ because those rubber boots were of this grey-green colour.”

“It started like this: ‘So you’ve been for so long in the Party, you are such an experienced comrade, how could you let this and that happen and so on. And what’s your opinion on this or that, what did you sign and what did you not sign? And what about Dubček?‘ They asked me this sort of questions and then the committee concluded that I, as an experienced office holder, who has held party offices in both the faculty and university Party committees, I was involved in the rightist opposition when I, as a weathered comrade, should have seen through the trickery of such politics. And for this, the committee proposes that I be expelled from the Communist Party.”

“The only backside of our place was, and that was a unique feature, in the middle of the garden, just in front of the main entrance and on the axis of the park, a large steel mast stood. A funicular which transported sorted coal from the general area of Silesian Ostrava lead just across our garden. The coal was, I think, from the Terezie Mine, and the funicular lead across Heřmanice and Hrušov to the mine. And that’s where the large slag heap came from, now they are cleaning it up. So, there, just above our heads, the cable cars moved. Can you imagine all the noise and the dust falling off the open cars? And, twice or thrice it happened that the car slipped off the cables and fell close or straight away in our garden. Otherwise, we lived in a lovely compound, it was almost like a manor house.”