Michal Matoušek

* 1953

  • In the commission was for example, Mr. Brůžek, the former Minister of Culture, and Mr. Angelis from psychologists, an agile communist, it was a crazy squad. They asked me what my participation in that meeting was supposed to mean, and I told them that there were things I could not agree with, that books that I think were the golden fund of Czech literature were thrown out of the library, and I named them names, specifically, for example, Mr Šotola, Mr Siktanc and others. They were very angry, and asked if I knew that Šotola had thrown his party legitimation under their feet. Then the Brůžek stepped in, I didn't know him or recognise him, and instead of staying quiet, I asked who he was, that we weren't introduced to each other. And he said that his name is Brůžek. I realized, so I said, 'Ah, you are the one who didn't let Led Zeppelin to Prague when they were coming?' Well, that was the end. You know, when you're young ... I think there's a degree of maladaptation in youth. "

  • “I remember one thing strongly, and that was in 1969, when we were sitting in Yugoslavia by the sea in such a cruise inn, and he got a bit too drunk there. He showed me the number from the concentration camp. He had apparently been in the concentration camp for a very long time. Abrahamovic is clearly a Jewish name of course.... So it is possible that he needed to "repay" someone after the war. I didn't recognize it on him. The only thing I remembered that evening was in 1969, when everyone knew, except for adolescents like me, that everything [with communism] was going downhill. So he sat there and showed me the number and said, 'You know, Michael, I'll never forget how a Soviet soldier opened the gates of Auschwitz to me.' And I think he tried to tell me that he will continue supporting communists, because it was simply written in his karma like that. That it is so and always will be like that. I was so young and stupid that I did not realize that."

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    Čerčany, 28.03.2022

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You will never work in culture, the party would take care of that, said a party member

Michal Matoušek, year 1955
Michal Matoušek, year 1955
zdroj: pamětník

Michal Matoušek was born on August 6, 1953 in Prague into the family of Centrotex‘s sales director Zdeněk Matoušek and his wife Marie. According to the witness‘s memories, the father worked as a young communist during the war in the anti-Nazi resistance, the mother joined the Communist Party immediately after the war in 1945. The father graduated from the University of Economics and began to build a career. In 1955, when Michal was two years old, the family travelled to Greece, where his father worked as a sales representative for Centrotex. They returned to their homeland in 1959. Michal devoted himself to athletics, and from the age of 13 he also played chess, he enjoyed studying Czech language and literature. In 1968 he entered a sports grammar school. In the same year, his father was fired from the post of sales director of Centrotex and then from the Communist Party. During the normalization, he worked for the ÚBOK (Institute of Housing and Clothing Culture) as an ordinary clerk. Michal graduated from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in 1972, majoring in Czech and philosophy. In the third year, however, he was fired for political reasons. He did not agree with discrimination against students who were not in the Socialist Youth Union, to which he himself belonged, and with censorship of literature. In 1976 he enlisted in the war in Sklene next to Handlova. Here he had a problem with the fact that he devalued the ballot during the election. He had no allowed time off, he was under the supervision of military counterintelligence. After returning from the war in 1978, he married. He found it difficult to find work for political reasons. Eventually, he found a job at a computer centre, at the Foreign Trade Mechanization, as a mainframe operator. After the coup in 1989, he and his colleagues founded the company s.r.o., but after about seven years, he was fired from the company he co-owned. Then he had a hard time looking for a new job. He found employment as a social services worker in a Drop-in Centre for Homeless People in Benešov, about which he wrote a book, “From the bottom”. He published three more books at his own expense. He was also a very good chess player, he bred German Shepherds for 25 years. He has been living with his second wife in Čerčany since 1985, with a son and two grandchildren.