Josef Horčic

“So I would like to go back to the history of my father, who spent decades studying at high schools in Prague from 1939 until 1950. He was one of those students, who were taken to concentration camps on 17th November, 1939. There they had to work the profession they knew. My dad was a developer by then. So I have his index and his letters from the concentration camps, from which I know what he has been through for the past ten years. And that knowledge that I gained later and which my father did not directly tell me, so my feelings were strong enough in the sense that I did not realize throughout my life, what problems he actually had and what happened during those ten years. Because he got married after returning from the concentration camp, he had already two children in the 1945, and then he was still studying and completing his studies. In 1949 his wife died. And at that moment, before graduating from college, he left the communist party in 1950 and refused to take the exam of... now I do not know what it was called - it was either political economy or something like that. So he did not complete college studies, he was fired from work, and had to look after two children as a widower.”

“As I was good at maths, I wanted to study the same secondary engineering school as my father. But I did not get there as they told my father it was his fault. I had to keep studying, as back then the eight-grade schools were ending and nine-grade ones started, so I just stayed. Then I got to the middle general educational college, which took three years. That meant 10th to 13th grade. Before that there were eleven-grade and twelve- grade schools. As I did not get to the engineering college, I had to stay in the ninth grade. It was easier to get to the gymnasium than to engineering college. But according to my father´s information, he was the reason I could not study straight away.”