Every victory has got two sides. As a sensitive person, you see joy on one side and sorrow on the other.
Rudolf Krauspe was born in Carpathian Ruthenia into a mixed French-Hungaro-Ukrainio-Czech family. His father was a farmer and a businessman. Mr. Krauspe was a first-rate sportsman, his ambitions were turned down by the war, however. He graduated from high school in 1944 - at the time when the area was already occupied by Hungary for several years. He desired to go study medicine but the universities were closed. Soon after, Carpathian Ruthenia was liberated by the Soviet army and he joined the Czechoslovak unit. He lied about having two semesters of medicine done - thanks to that, he later got to the medics. His main objective was to give first aid right at the front, therefore he was under fire during almost every assault. He doesn‘t like to think back much about what he experienced. The end of the war reached him near Kroměříž and on May 10th he got as far as to the outskirts of Prague. He demobilized only in July and then signed up for dreamt-of medicine. He received a military scholarship in exchange for his word that he would re-join the army after his studies. He settled down in Czechia while his parents returned to Carpathian Ruthenia. Their property there was nationalized, though, after the area‘s annexion by the USSR. His father was sentenced to two years of prison in his seventy years of age for an alleged „theft of socialist property“. Rudolf Krauspe later served as a surgeon in Hradec Králové, Prague-Střešovice and Pilsen. After 1974 he became head of the surgery department in Rokycany.
