75 years since 11 hockey players were imprisoned in Czechoslovakia
75 years ago, the Communist regime arrested eleven Czechoslovak hockey players. First, the Communists hailed them as world champions. Then they sent them to the uranium mines. They were convicted of treason and espionage in a mock trial.
The arrests began in a restaurant in the center of Prague. The athletes gathered there after the Communists prevented them from going to the World Cup in Britain. "This is one of the worst interventions of the Communist authorities in the sphere of sport. It decimated a hockey team that could have won several more times," says Jan Kalous, a historian at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes.
Stanislav Konopásek received one of the highest sentences, twelve years, in a mock trial. He was released after five years. According to his son, he survived his imprisonment in the uranium mines thanks to his character and humor.
Jan Konopásek saw his father play hockey only a few times. He used to see him more on the bench than on the ice as a coach. He is also reminded of his father by a gold hockey stick on a chain—a pendant he inherited from him. His desire to play hockey professionally faded, but he played for Sparta's youth.
He learned about the hardships his father had to face from historians and the media. When he asked his father, he did not want to revisit the memories. "You could see that [the topic] brought back memories, bringing him close to tears. So I stopped it," Konopásek says.
But some answers to questions about the execution of the sentence are in Stanislav Konopásek's personal file, as well as a photograph from prison. Other hockey players, including Bohumil Modrý, also had such a file; his sentence was the highest—fifteen years. He was punished for using Morse code to write out Merry Christmas wishes for other prisoners.
World champions still gather at the restaurant, earning it the nickname "the golden one." Today, a plaque commemorates the hockey players.
