“As of the early summer or even late spring of 1989, Pilsen-university graduates from Klatovy started congregating by the fountain in the centre of Klatovy. Eight to ten people would come together, and they would publicly read various speeches and declarations, obtained from Prague-based dissidents. And they we were waiting to see the reaction of the authorities, would the police get involved, or wouldn’t it? The meetings by the fountain started attracting more and more people. And when it was clear that the tanks hadn’t pulled out, so to speak – that there wouldn’t be any repercussions – the meetings were moved to the steps of the Jesuit church overlooking the entire central square. And this square gradually started to fill. As of September 1, I had started a new teaching job in Klatovy. Before that, I had been teaching at vocational schools in Pilsen. I was happy not to have to commute every day. And I remember as if it were yesterday… I was teaching at this well-hidden vocational school, it’s kind of tucked away. And I was walking home past the school gym and Mr Pikhart, one of the initial ten people by the fountain, was coming to meet me. And he says, ,Mr Mráz, I’d like to talk to you. You see, in our initiative, we’re all young and inexperienced, whereas you’ve got some political history, wouldn’t you like to join us?’ And I said to myself, I simply cannot refuse…”
“The currency reform affected us in that shortly before its announcement in June, my mother had collected my deceased stepfather Dobner’s life insurance, which came to ten thousand crowns. That was quite a lot of money at the time. He must have started paying into his life insurance policy first and then we must have taken over. He passed away on April 8, 1953, and then we got the money, but then the currency reform followed in June. You were able to exchange about five hundred crowns at a decent rate, I believe. And for whatever else you had on top of that, the exchange rate was one to fifty. So, in fact the currency lost its value. So, my mother suffered this unfortunate financial blow.”
“There were quite a few of these so-called ,damaged teachers’. And they all ended up at this school in Sokolov, as that was a school for adults, and so the unwholesome teachers wouldn’t be corrupting the youth. There were about five of us ‘damaged ones’. There were three types of damage: expelled, dismissed from the Party, and other. Whoever was expelled had no chance, they were fired almost automatically. I was a non-party member of course. The thing was dragging on and no one knew whether they were going to start sacking people or not. We were under a lot of pressure.”
“I remember the war. They were always at war. Wouldn’t stop shooting at each other… I felt they kind of enjoyed it. We came into contact with the war as early as 1940. That was– They mostly fought amongst themselves. It was Serbs against Croats, Orthodox Christians against Catholics… Already in Čapljina, we saw them fighting in the streets, one group against another, but I mean one group of Yugoslavs against another group of Yugoslavs. And then the Germans burst in, and the constant bickering stopped. Naturally it did, didn’t it. For a short while there was no fighting, but then, when we had already settled in Dubrovnik, Italy occupied Dalmatia. Hitler’s ally Mussolini took over the whole Dalmatian coast. And they were a glorious sight to look at, these Italian carabiniers, walking around with their rifles and sporting their wide-brimmed hats. Later, when they fought with the Germans… the Germans fired three times and the Croats instantly broke down and so Dalmatia fell under Berlin’s control. Luckily, when freedom fighters fought over Yugoslavia, they struck some deal with the Germans and Dubrovnik was left alone as a free city. So, there was a lot fighting everywhere around us, but the fortifications, the historical town, remained intact.”
Karel Mráz was born on November 22, 1936, in Slovak Kremnica where his parents, both originating from and around Czech Klatovy, were working at the time. His father was a mining engineer at the Zbrojovka Brno munitions factory. In 1940, he, his wife, and two children relocated to Yugoslavia, where a bauxite deposit had been found and he got the job of the head of the mining office. He died prematurely, though, and so the widow and two children returned to Klatovy. The vacated space was briefly filled in by Alois Emil Dobner, a lecturer at the Mining University in Ostrava. Karel Mráz’s mother married him in 1947 and the family followed him to Ostrava. However, Dobner ended up being tried for treason in a show trial and died from the effects of inhumane imprisonment on April 8, 1953. Mráz’s mother lost the ten thousand of her deceased husband’s life insurance in the currency reform. The family yet again returned to Klatovy. After his school-leaving exam in 1956, Karel Mráz started studying Czech and history at the Teacher-Training University in Pilsen. After graduation in 1960, he started his obligatory two-year military service in Zvolen, Slovakia, where he was teaching army officers Czech in preparation for their graduation exams. On September 1, 1962, he started teaching at the Secondary School of Agriculture in Klatovy. He was visiting his relatives in Prague during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968. In 1973, he was forced to leave both his job at the school and Klatovy town due to his membership in the so-called Club of Committed Non-Party Members. Later, he was teaching in Sokolov, Karlovy Vary, and Pilsen. He was allowed to return to Klatovy not long before the Velvet Revolution broke out and he co-founded the local chapter of the Civic Forum. In 1990, he was voted on the local government as a representative, and between 1995–2006, he was the mayor of Klatovy. At the time of the interview, he was living in Klatovy with his wife Věra and her daughter Sylva, who he had raised, and he was still keenly interested in public affairs. He died on April 29, 2024.
