The story of Mašín brothers has shaken the Czech nation for over the sixty years. Two young brothers, sons of an army officer Josef Mašín, were fighting against the Communist regime as leading figures of underground resistance. After 1948, when Communists seized power, they witnessed how some family friends vanished without a trace or were sentenced to death in public show trials. Then, during their attempt to escape from Communist Czechoslovakia to fight with communism from abroad, they accidentally killed three or more people. Some of those people were in the service of the Communist regime, some of them – only partly. And this is the point about which people have for decades been drastically divided into two parties – those who are still poisoned by Communist propaganda about the past judge the brothers only for their murders and do not acknowledge them as a heroes, and the others (only 15% of the population) who are thankful to them for their brave attempts to free our country. The Mašín brothers lived abroad and did not want to come back to their country, because, as they said, Czech politicians never truly finished with their Communist past. The pun: The Czech name “Mašín” is pronounced in the same way as the English word for “machine”.

František Chaloupka