„In 1959, the twins, Alenka and Klárka, were born. At one year of age, they were taken for a checkup to the hospital. Mom only returned with Klára, they kept Alenka in hospital for observation. After two or three days, they called and told us that Alenka died and that they wouldn’t even show her to us because she is already cremated. I think that back in 1959, during those times, it was common with large families that the children would disappear.”
„That was an injustice of humongous proportions, I was not used to it. I had been always very good in maths, the best in our class, and suddenly, when Miss Langerová started teaching us, everything went wrong. I never did anything well, when I raised my hand, I was never asked to answer. I started to feel inferior, a feeling I had never experienced before. Until that time, I had not been aware that I was Romani, the children were mixed in classes, there was only maybe a third of Romani children in our class.”
„It was a goddamn comedy. We were loading lorries carrying the rockets onto a train in Žatec and we had to mask it in such a way so that it would seem that we were transporting only the lorries. Then we would criss-cross the whole country, then to Moscow and then back again. The return trip took about two months on the train. We all lost weight there because we had the runs all the time. When we got there, we were at a polygon in a steppe, nothing else for a thousand kilometres in every direction. From there, we would go and shoot the rockets in the desert and to work with explosives. I was an explosive technician and a first class driver so I was in charge of one platoon.”
„All those who came to Ústí started to live new lives. One could see it in that Na Žižkovce house, those who lived there had the same habits as those who lived in the Romani villages. Our familz was the same and you can imagine how the house looked like. The truth is, we kept visiting each other, we were in contact all the time, nobody was separated. We still held up the Romani traditions: the elders are always right, they are held in esteem and they are to be obeyed, that’s what we did.”
Karel Karika was born on the 24th of October in 1960 in Ústí nad Labem into a large Romani family as the youngest of nine children. The whole extended family came to Northern Bohemia from Gypsy settlements in Eastern Slovakia. First to arrive were Karel’s grandparents, later it was various uncles and aunts who came to Ústí nad Labem in search of work and better living conditions.
The Karika family got into troubles after the 1968 occupation because after the Warsaw Armies invasion, his father slapped a Communist dignitary. Karel Karika suffered … behaviour from his teacher and he had to change schools. He managed to graduate from high school only by attending evening courses after he finished his army service. He served in the army from 1979 till 1981 with a missile batallion in Mariánské Lázně. In 1980, his unit spent some time in the training centre in Kazakhstan where he witnessed deployment of anti-aircraft missiles in the vast steppes. In the spring of 1989, he lost his job and started his own business. In November of the same year, he took part in one of the first demonstrations against industrial air pollution. In 2021, he lived in Ústí nad Labem, he was active in local politics and in charity.
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!
