Jaroslav Machovský

zdroj: Security Services Archive
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Jaroslav Machovský was born on February 20, 1932 in Bernartice near Dolní Kralovice into the religiously-minded family of František Machovský, a farmer and mill owner. After attending the municipal school in Dolní Kralovice, he entered the real school in Křemencová Street in Prague. A year after the communists came to power in February 1948, the real grammar school was closed down and Jaroslav had to take his last year elsewhere. In addition, his parents were given a plot of land to cultivate, the so-called forced rent, from which they had to pay increasingly higher rations of agricultural crops and products. The milling of grain had to stop in 1949. In 1952, his father was arrested for allegedly failing to declare the total acreage of his fields. He was subsequently sentenced to four and a half years‘ imprisonment as a ‚village rich man‘ for ‚endangering the unified economic plan‘. The family was to be evicted from the mill, but in the end the mother and his mentally handicapped brother were allowed to stay. From September 1951 Jaroslav Machovský studied at the University of Agricultural and Forest Engineering in Prague, returning to his family for holidays and Sundays. At that time, a resistance group, consisting of his friends and other persons, began to operate in Bernartice. They collected weapons, produced anti-communist leaflets and wrote slogans on public buildings. They recruited other like-minded people from the surrounding area in case the communist dictatorship was overthrown. In the summer of 1952, Jaroslav Machovský joined the group, having obtained several weapons and bullets. In anticipation of the outbreak of armed conflict with the regime, he devised plans for how the group under his command should proceed. The specific instructions were to raid and occupy strategic locations such as the post office and the SNB station in Dolní Kralovice. On the other hand, he discouraged the members of the group from printing and distributing anti-communist leaflets for fear of being exposed. In the summer of 1953, Jaroslav Machovský was expelled from university for political reasons. At the end of 1953, part of the group was arrested. Before the regional court in Jihlava on June 2, 1954, a total of nine men were convicted of anti-state activities in a terrorist group. Jaroslav Machovský, as the alleged commander, received the maximum sentence of 24 years‘ imprisonment for treason, and was also sentenced to the loss of his honorary civil rights for five years and the forfeiture of his entire fortune. He served his sentence in the camps in the Jáchymov region. First he was sent to the Nikolaj camp, Eduard shaft, and in the autumn of 1955 he was transferred to the Rovnost camp. From 1957 he worked in the technical department of the Opava prison as a designer. The May 1960 amnesty did not apply to him. After the abolition of the technical department in Opava, he was imprisoned for the last months in Pankrác, from where he was released on October 7, 1960. After his return to freedom, he had to work as a miner in the mines of Kladno, but in January 1961 he was conscripted into the army. After his release, his father and his wife kept sheep in the mill, which became a state farm. Until his retirement in 1991, Jaroslav Machovský held several jobs in technical fields, but for a long time he was not allowed to work as a skilled worker. After the fall of communism, he received an award as a participant of the anti-communist resistance.