Jaroslav Skopal

* 1936

  • “The second moment I made a bit of a revolution was that after the hockey game, as we defeated the Soviet Union. The shop window screen of Aeroflot on Wenceslas Square was broken down with the cobblestones that lay there at hand. It was interpreted, and the information came to me that it was a provoked action to shout out, 'Hooray, we won hockey!' And hinted at some kind of revenge. A member who was put in could take the cube first and throw it into the shop window. I presented it in some more coherent form as a question to Minister Grösser in the Czech National Council, as a question to explain, with other questions. He answered the lighter one immediately and said that the others had to be investigated and answered later. So I made such a negative advertising for the future, and a positive for the present.”

  • “Then it really proved that in the leadership of the CSSD a number of members, if not an absolute majority of those who were in the presidencies, if possible, the communists got them to cooperate to announce what the others say there. It was probably based on that. Because those who might have been national socialists or later, they found something for everyone, a misdemeanor that could be thought to have been a crime. And by threatening them, they accepted the cooperation in most cases. At that time, I did not know, I took it only as a general suspicion. At that time, I wasn't quite interested, I was still a young member...”

  • “So I became a proper member of the Czech National Council and there was an interesting way of getting me into it. Our then chairman Bohuslav Kučera was a man who knew the way in politics. But he also had to take certain steps. At that time, it was said that he was connected to the State Security, but nobody said exactly how and what were the information sources. When I myself asked Bohuslav Kučera later - he was about a year before his death, I didn't know at that time - I interviewed him and asked him indirectly how he looked at it as saying that there was some double membership in the party, someone had two IDs, so he answered me as if expected: 'You know, these things are hard to prove.' If it even existed, it was all secret, and then it was shredded, but not everything.”

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    Olomouc, 06.06.2019

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    duration: 02:33:12
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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We couldn’t go with a gun against a cannon

Jaroslav Skopal at the age of two in Košice around 1938-1939
Jaroslav Skopal at the age of two in Košice around 1938-1939
photo: archiv pamětníka

We couldn’t go against a cannJaroslav Skopal was born on September 24, 1936 in Košice in a mixed Czech-Slovak family. After the proclamation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Skopals had to leave Slovakia. They headed to Přerov, where Jaroslav’s sister Dagmar was born later. As a teenager, the witness was involved in the activity of the renewed Sokol unity in Přerov after the war. He studied briefly at the grammar school and later on at the twelve-grade school. After graduation he went to study in Prague and successfully graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Czech Technical University. After shortened military service he worked for several months in Branecke Zelezarny. In 1960 he joined the company Přerovské strojírny, where he stayed all his life. He worked as a research and development worker in the field of automatic process control of technological equipment, which the company produced for domestic market as well as for export. In 1967 he joined the Czechoslovak Socialist Party (ČSS) and since the end of 1968 he was a member of the Czech National Council. At the end of September 1969, he resigned from his post. He did not pass the political screenings the following year, which meant a number of sanctions at work and interrogations and persuasion for cooperation with the State Security. Following his father’s model, in 1963–1990 he devoted himself to training activities in Spartak Přerov Engineering Works. After 1989 he returned to politics, later only at the municipal level. Since 1997 he has been working as a pensioner in the field of quality consultancy for ten years. In recent years, he has published a number of publications - Against the Stream of Time (his own memoirs), Struggles with Totalitarianism and Escape for Freedom (life stories of Rudolf Lukaštík and his friend Bohuslav Ečer), portrait of General František Moravec or The End of One Big Party? Devoted to the Czechoslovak Socialistic Party and its successors. In 2019 he lived in Přerov.on with a gun