RNDr. Otakar Mach

* 1934

  • "Supposedly it was some kind of cooperation agreement... Dr. Zadražil and Hložánek came to me and offered me to go to Italy, to Brescia, to fulfil some agreement on scientific and technical cooperation. So, I thought: Why shouldn't I go? And that's how it started. But we were never friends with Hložánek. We didn't get along. Then I had to go to the Ministry of the Interior for questioning, it was at Letná and I was there for about an hour..."

  • "I was still trying to push the test, SPOFA was interested in it, they wanted to produce it, it was even patented, there were patents even in America, SPOFA drew up a plan for joint research between SPOFA and the Academy of Sciences, but it never passed the Academy because Hložánek blocked it."

  • "They were bringing me materials to review that they had obtained from laboratories abroad. These were all familiar things, they were nothing new, they were common things concerning the production of tests. Nothing new."

  • "Our house got in a zone that, which in addition to the Munich Agreement, was occupied by Germany, by Hitler. (...) There was no German minority there, it was purely Czech in those mountains. (...) All the inhabitants, no matter what their nationality, immediately lost their Czechoslovak citizenship and became citizens of the Greater German Reich, and my father decided that he could not stay there, that he would have to go and fight for Hitler. Fortunately, we were here near Prague. (...) And so he managed to move the whole production to Jilemnice, which was not yet occupied at that time (...) and at the same time he applied for Czechoslovak citizenship at the district administration in Jilemnice. I still have a document: Otakar Mach, his wife Marie and son Otakar, citizens of the Greater German Reich, apply for Czechoslovak citizenship as refugees. We got it in February and on 15 March it was over, it was already a protectorate."

  • "When I came home on my birthday on 25 March 1948, the apartment was upside down and my father was in Valdice or Kartouzy. Do you know what that is? A prison. He was arrested. But then I found this piece of paper in the Semily archives after the 1989, and on it, it was written with a pencil: enemy of socialism. That's all. They immediately nationalized everything, which was absolutely illegal, because the law didn't exist yet. We were given a national administrator, but we weren't thrown out of our apartment. They threw the rest of the teachers out of the school, and there was a new headmaster - a adept big comrade - and I remember that when he came in, I was already in the fifth grade, he came into the classroom and I had to go out and he lectured my classmates there that they couldn't be friends with me, that I was the son of an enemy of socialism."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 22.11.2018

    (audio)
    duration: 01:48:56
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Praha, 13.12.2018

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    duration: 44:53
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 3

    Praha, 16.12.2020

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    duration: 02:10:44
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 4

    Praha, 21.07.2021

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    duration: 01:53:10
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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As a scientist I was discriminated against, Czechoslovakia had no interest in its own HIV tests

Otakar Mach, 1960
Otakar Mach, 1960
photo: pamětník

RNDr. Otakar Mach, CSc., was born on 25 March 1934 in Jilemnice. Shortly afterwards his family moved to a new house in nearby Hrabačov. The Mach family owned a cardboard and bookbinding company. After the signing of the Munich Agreement, the Mach family’s house fell into the German-occupied territory and the family moved to Jilemnice. They returned to Hrabačov only after the war. In 1948, his father Otakar Mach Sr. was arrested and prosecuted for alleged anti-state activities. In spite of the unfavourable cadre assessment, Otakar graduated from the grammar school in Jilemnice in 1952 and got into the Faculty of Science at Charles University - majoring in biochemistry. However, he had to interrupt his studies for health reasons. He got a job in the laboratory of endocrinology and metabolism at the III. internal clinic of the Faculty of Medicine of Charles University. In 1958 he moved to the Institute of Haematology and Blood Transfusion, Department of Biochemistry, where he worked as an independent specialist. He investigated the physico-chemical properties of blood proteins. From 1961 he worked in the clinical department of this institute. In Professor Libánský’s group he investigated the possibilities of leukaemia treatment. In 1962 he resumed his full-time studies at the Faculty of Science of Charles University and in 1968 he received the degree of Doctor of Science. In August 1968 he initiated a signature action against the occupation. From January 1969 he collaborated with the Institute of Experimental Biology and Genetics (ÚEBG) of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (CSAS). Otakar Mach worked in Jan Svoboda’s group, which dealt with research on retroviruses. During the period of normalization, he was not allowed to travel to the West for political reasons, but he participated in many working trips within the Eastern Bloc. In 1984, his superiors offered him the opportunity to travel to Italy, where he got a job at the Institute of Virology in Brescia. The trip was possible thanks to the Institute’s contacts with the State Commission for Scientific and Technical Development and Information (SKVTRI), which was a cover for Czechoslovak intelligence. He was in Italy twice, the first time in 1984 for a month, the second time in 1985 for half a year. There, in addition to his regular lab work, he worked secretly on his own development of HIV tests based on synthetic peptides. In the second half of the 1980s, he tried to push the production of synthetic peptide-based tests in Czechoslovakia, but there was no interest from the Institute of Molecular Genetics. He claims that he was blackmailed when, in the early spring of 1989, he was approached with an offer to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in order to continue his work with peptides. In 1990, Otakar Mach filed a criminal complaint against the former Minister of Health Prokopec and Dr. Sirůček of the State Institute of Health for failing to initiate timely testing of blood donors and blood products for HIV antibodies, resulting in several haemophiliacs contracting AIDS through the administration of contaminated blood products. At that time, he was already working at the Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion, where he headed the viral infection prevention laboratory and where they tested donors’ blood for infectious diseases. Until 2012, he also lectured on viruses in the Department of Biochemistry of the Faculty of Science. He is a Christian and raised two daughters with his wife Alena.