On my first day at the uranium processing plant, my eyes immediately filled with tears and I couldn‘t breathe.
Stáhnout obrázek
Miroslav Šmejkal was born on 20 July 1950. His parents divorced while he was still at school and his mother Marie remarried to Jan Fišer. The family moved to Jáchymov in 1960, where Jan Fišer got a job in the uranium mines. There, he spent three years in the immediate vicinity of the labour camps. His uncle Stanislav Zima, who was sentenced to 17 years in prison for espionage, was also imprisoned in one of them. In 1963, the family moved to Zliv, where Miroslav‘s stepfather got a job in the newly opened MAPE uranium ore processing plant. After secondary school, the witness joined full-time military service with the Border Guard. After graduating from the six-month non-commissioned officer‘s engineer school, he was assigned to the engineer company of the 15th Brigade of the Border Guard. The unit to which he was assigned carried out the shifting of a signal wall in the area of the Novohradské Mountains. After the war, he joined MAPE-Mydlovary in the measurement and regulation section. In the ore processing plant he witnessed frequent chemical spills and other environmental accidents, which were kept secret by the company management. He refused to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Because of his interest in Western music and maintaining written contact with emigrants, he was monitored by Communist Party agents. In 1986 he was interrogated for the first time by State Security. The State Security captain JUDr. Malecha introduced the file of the candidate of secret cooperation „Oto“ on him, but after a while he stated that the witness was only „acting stupid“ and moreover he deconspired the captain. In November 1989, Miroslav Šmejkal supplied Budějovice students with paper for the production of posters and leaflets from MAPE stocks. In Zliv he became a member of the Civic Forum. After the revolution, he remained in the company as a sales clerk, then as chief engineer. He witnessed the illegal dumping of MAPE waste in the 1990s. He retired in 2017.
