“I couldn't get to high school. I still had all the top marks, because I was so stubborn. And when I applied to high school, the so-called SVVŠ, a secondary general school, I was not recommended because of the class origin. And it was decided by the street committee that was chaired - I think the gentleman worked on the rails, so he was competent. I was lucky enough to learn German privately, and Mr. Redlich was a wonderful person, so he asked me if I got to the so-called ´gympl´. And I said, 'Mr. Redlich, you know I didn't.' He said, 'Don't worry, I'll ask my son-in-law who's a professor there.' And professor Beneš got me there. But what was interesting about the character of this professor - he was a wonderful man. They went to see him from all over the Central Bohemian Region and elsewhere for his literature and Czech lessons. Mainly literature, he was just a wonderful man. He also brought up Mr. Viktor Preiss, was is my class mate two years older. So, this man made it, but then, when the liberal years came, he founded KAN, the Club of Involved Stakeholders, in Říčany. And then he paid the price. He was fired and worked in a canteen. Such a giant. Again, the communists don't value anything." - "And this was the professor Beneš - and Mr. Redlich you talked about?" - "Mr. Redlich was his father-in-law. He said it, and the professor made sure I got there. So one must be lucky in life to meet decent people and give him a helping hand. So I actually got this life insight and I tried to help other people all my life.”
“We were everywhere, we went to those meetings - statesman Smrkovský, Čestmír Císař - who else was there? Awesome people! We believed them. We thought they meant it seriously with that socialism with a human face, because we didn't know how it would turn out. But when they said there was a counter-revolution - it was none! That was normal social development for the better future. That they could finally do what they wanted, and they could say to each other - besides insults, of course - whatever they wanted, because they couldn't take away their democratic rights.”
“At that time I was working 3rd surgery in the London street. I was working in the ambulance hall and we experienced the 21st of August. That was absolutely horrible, I remember it as good as today, at eleven o'clock in the morning two boys arrived on a motorcycle: 'Get ready, Tatra truck rode into the crowd of people at the Radio!' The emergency cars began to arrive and I was pulling the first one out. And he was dying in a horrible way. That day there were ninety-three people we treated, out of which thirteen were dead. From the Radio. So I thought, 'This is something terrible.' And I thought I'd run away. But there was nowhere to run.”
“We then took the lesson from the Crisis Development in those early normalization times. It was such a horrible pamphlet. I went angry to the test, I said, what am I going to tell them? I was being examined by a senior lecturer, Professor Picmaus, and she asked me what I was doing on August 21st. So I told her everything - how many dead people I took to the morgue and so on. And she says, 'Colleague, give me the index.' She wrote me A without answering. Brave woman! She was fired, too. We were got a lesson, but a different one.”
“Well, we have already started founding the Civic Forum. I immediately went to Národní třída and watched how it is actually done. There is the Adria Palace - there was the seat of the Civic Forum. So we called with my classmates - Jaromir Jech - to organize a meeting. So we set up a Civic Forum meeting and there were over a thousand people there!” - “Excuse me, how long has it been since November 17?” - “It was close!” - “So Saturday, perhaps?” - “Yes. They gave me a microphone, and in a shaky voice I was telling what the communists were doing. But suddenly I found out that it was perfect. I was woken up by how my grandfather was the economist - so I was wondering what if we could manage our city well as the good landlords? That's the main thing. Politics is a bit of a by-product, but the decisive thing is that the people in the city have a good time, have a sewer, gas, electricity and so on. Well, we did go to the National Committee - our party from the Civic Forum - and we dismissed all those who were officials on the National Committee. And we started to act as a national committee - Jaromir Jech and I were members of the national committee, imagine that!”
“My father had a single cousin, Zdeněk Slavík. Zdeněk was two years older than my father, but they understood each other perfectly. Zdeněk Slavík was a journalist and a national socialist. When there was a trial in 1949 or when it started with Dr. Horáková, he was a part of the trial. He was sentenced to death at the age of twenty-nine, then he was pardoned for life. That was something terrible. He was locked up in the worst jails: Valdice, Leopoldov, Bory, Mírov. He said it was the worst in Mírov, there was comrade Grebeníček, who kicked his front teeth out. Nothing happened to Grebeníček either. But why do I say it – he was not broken. He was unbroken for sixteen years. When he was released after Novotny's amnesty I asked him, how he survived. But he didn't want to talk much about it. He just said that he was there with the ones from the church and they said to him, 'You have to endure it, what if everything changed tomorrow?' That single sentence kept him alive. He spent a year in a concrete bunker in solitary confinement. They still didn't break him. So he was released in 1946, and he escaped through Vienna to Canada in 1967. There he immediately got connected, he was writing back. And we wrote a lot, even with the parents. And I have to thank the employees of the post office in Říčany that nobody split on me.”
“I don't know, I as a humanist, I feel… I really appreciate the act, I do appreciate it. But then, when you look back, whether the act was adequate, if you should really sacrifice life for Czech people who didn't deserve it - unfortunately. But I'm so sorry for Zajíc and everyone else. But they wanted to wake up those people and I feel they didn't succeed. You see - now, too - how you wake them up? Fortunately, especially the young people, which is sensational, in these demonstrations I can see now the same young people, who behave just fantastic - so I believe in them that they will keep the development. While back them it was not possible. Because the students were intimidated by the assault, the troops, and the adults were afraid. They began to worry. They experienced the 1950s and remembered how much it could cost them. But most of all, their children paid the price. Because after the year 1968 following the screening, it was just like the 1950s; there was a ban on studying, getting out of work - the adults same as the kids getting expelled from school. This was terrible. Yet there was such a moment, the funeral of Palach, when suddenly there were three hundred thousand people in the streets. Indeed, that was breath-taking, but they were the young ones. As for the older ones... they were just exceptions, but mostly the students. Because their colleague sacrificed himself, they had such student coherence and they wanted to show they did care.”
Karel Stanslický was born on 1 April 1949 in Prague and spent most of his life in Říčany near Prague. Father’s grandfather, Adolf Stanslický, was a successful First Republic entrepreneur, national economist and farmer, who saved the family of Minister Feierabend during the war. Grandmother, Apolena Stanslická, was of Jewish origin, which the family managed to conceal during the war. His father, also Adolf Stanslický, was forced to work in the Reich. His father’s cousin, Zdeněk Slavík, was sentenced to death in the trial of Milada Horáková, later he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and subsequently released during an amnesty and emigrated to Canada. Despite difficulties with “bourgeois” origin, Karel Stanslický studied medicine and became a gynecologist and obstetrician. At the university he spent the Prague Spring, the occupation of Warsaw Pact troops and the beginnings of normalization. During the occupation he also worked as an ambulance on the III. surgery in London, where he received injured and dead from the skirmishes from Radio. In November 1989 he participated in the Revolution and co-founded the Civic Forum in Říčany, which deposed and replaced officials of the local national committee. He ran for the Civic Forum in the first free municipal elections in November 1990 and became the Říčany councilor. He worked in municipal politics until 1997 and at the same time pursued the profession of gynecologist. Karel Stanslický died in December 2020.
