"Actually, right after the war, in the gymnasium I went to, there were boys there who were with the partisans. And because the school was occupied by the Russian army, we studied in pubs at the gymnasium, because there was no place else. Well, some of those guys even went there armed. So the cantors begged us to shoot those guns after class." - "You didn't carry a gun?" - "Well, I didn't have a gun, but I went out with friends who had them, and there was target shooting and so on. It was very easy back then, in 1945, to get weapons because they were lying around... German soldiers who were running away threw them away, left them lying by the road, so they were easy to get hold of."
"I like to remember the time after graduation. It was in 1947, when I was 19 years old and we went to the Veleslavice mountain herding cooperative near Český Krumlov and lived there with students. We were there in the brigade, because it was said that if we want to go to university, that we have to have a part-time job. So we went there for a month doing a part-time job. And five of us lived in one room in such an old farmhouse, there were fleas, terrible fleas there. However, we sometimes worked, sometimes we they wandered around Šumava. It was still the year 1947, there were no wires on the borders yet. Well, we caught fish in our hands and roasted them on the fire, at the age of 19. And then we went back to work. I I rode there on a horse without a saddle, because it was a mountain herding team. The horse almost ran, and I just lowered my head in time, otherwise it would have hit the branches in the forest and I might have lost my sight."
"I had a brother, I was 16 years gone, my brother was 19. And at noon, we were in the town where we came from in the morning, and then we were returning home and we heard a terrible shooting. So we ran away, the hill is named At the castle. There were caves like this that led to a castle. And those are already filled in. Well, we didn't know what was going on, what the shooting meant. And meanwhile they ordered that all the men – no all the men, because we were outside - my father too, all the men had to go to that square. Mladá Vožice had about two thousand inhabitants at the time, so it was about a thousand men. We only heard that from stories. All the people they had to bring radios, radio receivers, they threw them in a pile there. And against those men in that square sat those SS men with armored fists and a machine gun and so on. And then they brought one there, he still has a monument to this day, he was 35 years old, he had two children and they found a pistol on him during a search. So they shot him on the spot as a warning in front of everyone."
Josef Kulvait was born on July 5, 1928 in Mladá Vožica in South Bohemia. At the end of the war, he experienced the invasion of German soldiers and the murders in Mladá Vožice, as well as the arrival of the Red Army. In 1947, he completed the real gymnasium in Tábor and subsequently began studying medicine at Charles University. Because he did not agree with the beginning changes, he took part in the student march to Prague Castle in 1948 and later also the funeral of Edvard Beneš. After his studies in 1953, he was sent as a young doctor to the borderlands, first to Sokolov, later to Karlovy Vary. But because he wanted to live in Prague, he became a district doctor. He had a serious crash in 1983 and still bears the consequences of the traffic accident to this day (2017). His wife died in the mid-1980s, he has a daughter.
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!
