Viewers have another opportunity to get to know the story of the group of brothers Mašín. Two films about them are coming to cinemas – one live, the other a documentary. However, one of the main heroes of the films, Josef Mašín, does not intend to come to the Czech Republic this time after many decades. “I’m not coming yet,” he said from the US through a computer screen after the screening of the documentary Escape from Berlin.
Festival organizers Unbreakable and self-sacrificing they prepared a surprise for the audience. After the preview screening of the documentary on Tuesday Escape from Berlin connected via video conference with Josef Mašín. The audience, which included a reporter from Aktuálně.cz, then had one of the rare opportunities to ask questions of the ninety-one-year-old man, who does not give interviews very often.
Josef Mašín, whose brother Ctirad died in 2011, pointed out at the very beginning of his talk with the audience that, unlike the film, the documentary Brethren I like it very much – with one comment. “I don’t like that the word escape is in the title, because it wasn’t an escape from our side,” claimed Mašín.
In October 1953, together with Milan Paumer, Václav Švéda and Zbyňek Janata, the Mašín brothers completed a thirty-day journey from totalitarian Czechoslovakia through the German Democratic Republic to West Berlin, during which they faced an outnumbered force of several thousand East German policemen and soldiers.
As Mašín has now revealed, they had only 52 cartridges. Three eventually shot their way into West Berlin. The Swede and Janota were caught by the Germans and subsequently executed.
“Today I hear that we did it out of imprudence. I am surprised when some historians and adults point to our youth. I am 91 years old today and I would deal with the experience of a person at that age just as I did then,” Mašín explained to the audience in the cinema and drew attention to the fact that in 1945 he and his brother Ctirad received an award for bravery from President Edvard Beneš.
They received it for resistance activities against the Nazis, which they carried out when Josef Mašín was twelve years old and Ctirad was fourteen. Their father, Josef Vladimír Mašín, was one of the greatest heroes of the anti-Nazi resistance. The Nazis executed him in 1942.
Josef Mašín claims that the meaning of their lives became the fight against unfreedom, which they started in Czechoslovakia. They wanted to continue it even after fleeing to the West. The film no longer shows that they joined the US Army after leaving their native land to fight against the communist regime. They believed that the Americans would want to free Czechoslovakia and other countries from the domination of the totalitarian Soviet Union.
But when they saw that the West did not support the Hungarian uprising against the communists in 1956, they understood that there would be no liberation and left the army. Josef Mašín became a successful businessman in the United States, who resented the conditions in Czechoslovakia after 1989 and has not returned to this day. According to him, the authors of the new film Brothers did not understand the basic meaning of their efforts.
“I am very disappointed. The people who made the film had no idea about those times. They are portraying my brother as a psychopath and both of us as minors who brought the whole family into trouble,” he complained.
According to him, the director Tomáš Mašín, who is his distant relative, wanted to make an attractive film for young people and he was not interested in reality. “I tried to explain everything to them as best I could, but they couldn’t explain it. They had their own opinions,” claimed Josef Mašín.
Chasing the whole family
Among other things, he alluded to how their mother is portrayed in the film. It seems from the film that she didn’t know about her sons leaving for the West. However, according to Josef Mašín, they told her in advance. “Our mom and Uncle Borek were the only ones who knew. There’s nothing about it in the State Security files because they didn’t really talk. Just like me and my brother didn’t talk during the interrogation. I’d like to see some of the smart ones if they went through the interrogations like we did, ” said Mašín from his home.
Their mother Zdena was imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1942 and released only after the death of her husband. In 1953, the communists sentenced her to 25 years in prison for helping her sons escape. She was seriously ill at the time. When she died in prison in 1956, they refused to release her remains to her daughter. For decades it was not clear where the remains of Mašín’s uncle Ctibor Novák ended up, whom the communists executed in a fabricated trial in May 1955 together with Švéda and Janata. This year, the remains of 69 people were found in the courtyard of the Pankrák prison, among them those belonging to the aforementioned three men.
The totalitarian regime also persecuted Mašín’s sister Zdeňka. President Petr Pavel awarded her a state award at the end of October. Like his predecessors, however, he refused to comply with people who proposed an award for the entire resistance group of the Mašín brothers.
Josef Mašín refused to answer Aktuálně.cz’s question whether it was important to him if he received the award. “Whether I say one or the other, it will be interpreted as Mašín wants an award, that’s why he talks like this,” declared Mašín.
At the same time, he paused over the fact that the highest Czech award, the Order of the White Lion, was not given to Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, paratroopers from Operation Anthropoid, who eliminated the acting Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich. “First, their question must be resolved,” added Mašín.
I’m not coming yet, answered Josef Mašín about a possible return to the Czech Republic
While preparing to escape, the group staged an armed ambush. In September 1951, they raided the office of the National Security Service in Čelákovice in order to obtain weapons. In the process, they killed SNB member Jaroslav Honzátek. A year later, they raided a truck with salaries in Kutnohorska. During this event, they shot the accountant.
The Mašinovs claim that the gendarme’s elimination was necessary because Ctirada saw and threatened to betray their resistance group. As for the accountant, Josef Mašín claims that he wrestled with the accountant over the gun that fired. But they mainly defend themselves by the fact that they waged an armed struggle against the regime, which executed many brave and innocent people.
President Pavel recently told MF Dnes that he will not appreciate the Mašinovs precisely because of the killing of a gendarme. “It was the killing of a person who posed no risk to them. Moreover, he was not killed in a way that would be justifiable in combat. Not with a gun, but with a dagger. I cannot come to terms with that internally,” the president said.
At the event, Mašín was asked if he would return to the Czech Republic for at least two films about him. He replied that he had no plans to do so yet. He also considered why the Poles and Hungarians stood up to the communist regime earlier.
“The fault is that the Czech nation is so casual, they let themselves like everything. That’s the Czech nature. The Poles are a little different people. Or the way the Hungarians fought. That was a completely different mentality. I see it in relation to us too, ” stated Mašín, saying that when they started to actively fight against the communist regime in 1951, they thought that more people would join them.
“What the Czech Republic has today, it did not fight for. Someone else is to blame for that. They lie in a cemetery in Normandy, Luxembourg and anywhere else,” he said, referring to the places where Allied soldiers who fought against the Nazis in World War II are buried cylinders.
Video: What the brothers did has haunted me my whole life, says Mašínová (October 25, 2023)
Spotlight Aktuálně.cz – Zdena Mašínová | Video: Jakub Zuzánek
2023-11-02 17:33:07
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