“We were children who were brought up during the First Republic era and this guaranteed that people like us have spent the formative years in absolutely different conditions than in the following years, whether during that short time of the Nazi rule or later during the long years of the communist regime. We were not burdened by the communist morals like all the children who were born into that system. Even the children from well-to-do honest families were hearing: ‘You can hear it, but it’s better if you don’t hear it, but you must not tell anyone about it, because they would then put your daddy in prison or kick him out of the job.’ We, too, then raised our children in a way that we were telling them: ‘Never speak about these things with anyone! About our meetings or about what we discussed.’”
“We went to Radotín, and they had a large American Pontiac. They had flags on the sides of the car – a Swiss and Czech flag. When we were passing through the Wenceslas Square and turning into Jindřišská Street, at the corner of the Melantrich building, there were people who were spitting at us and gesticulating and shouting – the working-class people.”
“The instructor was simply a little idiot who arrived there from the Chuvach Mmountains. Perhaps he rode the train for the first time when he went to the army, and now someone gave him authority and told him: ‘You will have doctors and university graduates under your command. Don’t give a fuck about them, you need to harass them.’ He followed this advice. Some guys who were there, especially those from the east, took pleasure in doing just that. Among us there were boys who were already doctors or lawyers.”
Pavel Krátký was born June 24, 1929 in Prague, but he spent his childhood and youth in Hradec Králové. His father was a legionnaire in Russia, where he fought in the battle of Bakhmach, and his mother worked as a teacher. In 1945-1948 Pavel Krátký studied the secondary school of agriculture, then he spent two semesters at the University of Agriculture, but he had to leave the school due to his family background (his father owned land in the Lanškroun region and he was marked as a kulak, and his two sisters lived in the West). Pavel attended a one-year course in the cooperative in Chrudim. In November 1950 he was drafted to the 51st Auxiliary Technical Battalion (PTP) in Mimoň. He spent two years in the PTP and apart from Mimoň he also served in Šternberk, Lešany and in Prague-Střešovice, where he worked on the construction of the Central Military Hospital. At the end of 1952 he signed a three-year commitment to work in military construction in order to be able leave the Auxiliary Technical Battalions. However, he had to go to work in agriculture soon after. Thanks to his wife he found a job in a large-scale fattening-station in Čepí, where he worked until his retirement in 1989. He was the chairman of the district branch of the PTP Union in Pardubice. Pavel Krátký died on February 9, 2024.
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