Vladimír Klenka

* 1928

  • "I remember when we marched like the Sokols in front of the grandstand in Old Town Square, when we came to the edge of the grandstand, from that edge were sitting Gottwald, Zápotocký, Kapek, all the communist elite, opposite them one Sokol members shouted: look to the left, so the Sokols instead of looking at the grandstand looked the other way and that was the end of Sokol in the republic..."

  • "People were getting out, convicts were getting out on both sides, going into the unknown in an unknown landscape, but most of those people... in Netřebice they made a kind of a connecting line from the train to Netřebice and showed these people which way to go, they were supposed to gather in these gardens, and then they drove them from there. Those who could walk would walk from Netřebice towards Velešín, and those who were not able would be taken to Velešín by a Jihostroj truck. It was interesting... these people were like lifeless, they were walking along that road, their eyes were in one direction and nothing attracted them, the surroundings, nothing at all... that they were happy to be liberated, that their great suffering was coming to an end, the handling of these people, that was something... and in those wagons there were different nationalities, French, Poles, Danes, all kinds of people..."

  • "We were staying in Královo Pole, where the vets were coming from, there were about three buildings of the veterinary school. On the first day, a total of 800 diggers started, 200 of us from Budějovice. There was always 200 metres marked at the field, we made these anti-tank V ditches, it was five metres wide at the top, five metres deep, and in the middle of the ditches there were paths, so the lower trencher, who was at the bottom, would throw the earth on the path, and the next one would throw it out, and the piles were piled around the trenches. If a tank was going to come in there, those were the Russian tanks then, he wouldn't get out of that. But we didn't even see the Russian tanks. We used to go to Klajdovka in Brno to make trenches for the normal soldiers, they were smaller and narrower, we always went in three lines of 200 people, we had shovels and pickaxes..."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    České Budějovice, 07.11.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:14:01
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Those people were like lifeless

Vladimír Klenka, 20 years old, 1948
Vladimír Klenka, 20 years old, 1948
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Vladimír Klenka was born on 22 November 1928 in Zliv. He grew up in the family of the head teacher of the school in Netřebice, his mother was a housewife. During the war, Netřebice was the last village before the German Reich, which caused difficulties for the citizens. Before the end of the war, he was sent on forced labour to Ponětice near Brno to dig trenches, where he also experienced air raids. After his return he witnessed many local events, for example the presence of Vlasov army in Netřebice, the famous liberation of the death train in Velešín or the stopping of the train with the Hungarian national treasure. After the communist coup in 1948 he participated in the XIth All-Sokol Meeting, where he experienced the now legendary Sokol refusal to pay respect to the Communist Party leaders on the grandstand. Vladimír Klenka personally never became a communist. He graduated from a secondary technical engineering school, worked all his life in the Jihostroj factory in Velešín, where he experienced the political trials broadcast in the 1950s. He raised two daughters and was living in Velešín in 2023.