Karel Jiřík

* 1952

  • "Did you ever get homesick when you were in Germany?" - "I was so busy that I never thought about it. I only thought of one thing. When I could come to the Republic, it would be May. So that everything would be in bloom and all the mess would be covered with green grass. But I arrived on January 29th, I crossed the border at Rozvadov, the Soviet soldiers were still there, the gate was already open, so they checked me, I went on to get my German papers. And when I drove about five kilometres, I stopped at this pond. A small lake. And when I saw the mess, I wanted to cry. But there was more. Listening to people here today, they've forgotten how bad things are. It was terrible here."

  • "Nobody burned me with cigarettes. But there was psychological pressure, where they thought I would have a breakdown. One time they came up with the fact that I had smuggled three hundred tons of glass. The second time they came back with... I can't remember exactly. That's a long time too." - "And did they tell you exactly what they wanted from you?" - "To write something. They weren't specific. They said if I didn't file a report. It culminated in me telling them I couldn't write very well. So they said I'd just take pictures. I'll say something else about that. It's recently when I met the people who were on the boat with me. They all worked together. I asked them why they didn't have problems like I did. - And all these people have a pension of about sixty-seventy thousand crowns today. Let me explain it simply. Fifteen thousand from the Czech Republic. And because after the year ninety they were driving for three countries. Holland. Luxembourg. Germany. That's how they collected it. So they got two and a half thousand euros a month of additional pension from these countries."

  • "I went to report to the police. I went to the police station at seven o'clock in the evening and said I wanted to stay there. But they told me they couldn't help me right away. That I had to stay until the morning when they would call the officials to discuss it with me. In the evening there was no officer there. They put me in a cell. They gave me Coca-Cola, left the cell open because they had no place to let me sleep. In the morning they took a small boat to my boat to get my personal belongings. I didn't have my passport or my swimming pass, but I had my papers. I had everything ready. But I was afraid to get on the boat. The German policemen told me not to be afraid, that I should take everything I needed, that they would let me off the boat again. And I must say that the captain behaved very well. He was a big communist, but he was very polite to me. He even wished me well."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Ostrava, 14.11.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:13:13
  • 2

    Ostrava, 16.11.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:22:09
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

They wouldn‘t let him go to sea, he sailed down the river. And finally he escaped

Karel Jiřík / 1994
Karel Jiřík / 1994
zdroj: archive of Karel Jiřík

He was born on 13 May 1952 and grew up in Bolatice in the Hlučín region. His father, Herman Jiřík, had to enlist in the Wehrmacht after the outbreak of World War II, fell into Russian captivity and returned in 1946. Since childhood, Karel Jiřík longed to travel and planned to become a sailor and sail the seas. He apprenticed in Ostrava as a locksmith. In 1968 he was active in the Union of Students and Apprentices, which was banned at the beginning of the normalisation after the August invasion. He repeatedly applied for a job at the Czechoslovak Shipping Company, but was always rejected. In 1973, he started working for the Czechoslovakian Elbe-Odra shipping company, sailing on the Elbe from Hřensko to Hamburg. State security forced Karel Jiřík to cooperate, but he did not cooperate and emigrated to Hamburg in 1981. He lived in Frankfurt am Main, where he earned his living as a taxi driver, and after 1990 he returned to Czechoslovakia and started his own business. At the time of filming in 2023, he was living in Opava.