"We were just there for people to laugh at. My brother only knew what he saw in the journals. Like a deep plowing. So he did the deep plowing. And people laughed because nothing grew there. Because he put the dead ground on top and the fertile ground on the bottom. So there was nothing there. For example, we planted potatoes. He didn't know they needed to be plowed, so I said to get a plow. But no one lent it to us because we were there for laughs. Then neighbor Hájek came in and said it could be grazed. So he drove the cows into the potatoes, the mother was happy with the cows grazing nicely. But there was no potato because it was stomped on, and so on. Then they ran away, and I was left alone. There was no food left, so in order for them not to die, I gave the animals to the collective. I gave them horses, I didn't care for how much, as long as they didn't starve to death."
He came that there was a farm in Velen and that we could move there. I was all for it, but I didn't know the consequences. And neither did the parents. So we bought the farm and moved. But the farm was in debt, completely destroyed, and we didn't know that, we didn't know. Thirdly, we didn't know there were any contingents. Jindra was only interested in horses, and otherwise he was a total nutjob. What was left, he destroyed completely. I was mainly a repairman there. Then one day they found out they could run away. So I was left there, and they took off."
"That's when the decree came out about the Jews wearing the yellow star. And they weren't allowed to walk on the sidewalk. They had to walk on the road like cattle. My mother said in advance that the lady was coming and that she was Jewish. She had a star and carried her purse to cover it. She had an ulcer on her shoulder. Mother said a doctor gave her an injection and she was a morphine addict. So he gave her an injection, and it festered. So she went to my mother's, and she treated her. If this were to be revealed, the penalty was gas. The whole family. That's what I'm saying now, in hindsight, but back then we weren't thinking about all going to the gas chambers."
"My mother was an invalid and had a pension. My father worked alone, I don't know how much he earned. He was a smoker. There were cigarettes, that was some amount of cigarettes. But since he smoked a lot, he smoked it all and bought cigarettes on the black market. Mom said she spent 700 crowns for cigarettes. Then it was missing for food. There was a ticket system. The way it worked was that when my mother wasn't working, she had lower doses. The father had higher doses when he worked, and the children had even smaller doses. And when mom didn't have money but had the tickets, she sold the tickets to make money. And then there were the crooks. So it got more expensive, and we didn't have anything." “Were you hungry during the war?” You get up in the morning, you don't care about any food, everyone knew that..."
František Karel was born on July 5, 1934 in Prague into the family of František and Marie Karel, he had five older siblings. Both parents were marked by World War I. His mother, as a front nurse, lost her leg in the war and was then retired because of the disability, his father passed through the Czechoslovak legions in Russia, and the war traumas affected him psychologically. The family lived in Holešovice and faced financial and social problems. Frantisek knew what hunger was. From the first grade he secretly helped out in the factory warehouse for a few crowns, the father, who beat him, was afraid and he [Frantisek] spent more time with the boys on the street than at home. He recalls how his mother secretly treated a Jewish woman, how her brother fled Germany in an SS camouflage jumpsuit, or the first Soviet tanks in May 1945. In 1952, the Karel family moved to the borderlands to Velké Velena in the Děčín region, where they bought the farm in instalments and tried to make a living from agriculture, but due to ignorance and inexperience they almost ended up in prison because they were unable to pay compulsory payments. Frantisek received a 14-month suspended sentence, his brother was given 18 months probation. In Velena, František ended up alone, handed over the farm to the state collective and worked for a decent salary as a tractor driver. In order to pay off the debts left over on the farm as quickly as possible, he made extra money with part-time jobs. He first married in the 1960s, but the marriage soon fell apart. In the early 1970s he and his second wife settled in Litoměřice, where they both worked in agriculture, after her death he moved to Usti nad Labem, where he found a job in a chemical plant and married for the third time. He became a widower in 2013. He died on September 19, 2024.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
