“There was enormous pressure from the Germans on the teachers. They were suddenly expected to speak German. Thus they had to pass those exams. German inspectors were visiting our school almost daily. I witnessed with my own eyes a rather aggressive attack of the occupiers on our grammar-school professors. They led them away from under our noses. That was the end. Notwithstanding the fact that we kept an eye on our dearest professor in Theresienstadt. However, we didn’t know that he ended up there. He was a fabulous musician.”
“The German occupation of Dolní Stakory, which I witnessed, was a major blow to the Czech population. I remember it quite well. The villagers had this dull look in their eyes. They kept staring bluntly at the German occupiers as they put their horse-drawn wagons in the yards of the individual village buildings. In addition to all the trucks that crossed the village, the Bavarians were quartered in the village with their horses and wagons. So the truth is that this company was thereafter quartered for two years in Stakory. This went so far that pretty nasty things were taking place in the neighborhood and our citizens became quite good friends with our Bavarian co-citizens. I remember quite vividly that during the occupation, in one of the houses, a pig was slaughtered twice a year just like before the war. The only difference was that there had to be a gentleman with a stamp approving the slaughter. This gentleman of course did not go home empty handed. He took a good chunk of the meat home with him. I think that it must have been a very good business for him. So he liked to give stamps.”
“The Soviets somehow came from the north. Of course that they had come to Mladá Boleslav in trucks, but from there, they came on bikes to the village. These bikes were apparently stolen. Each one had a different bike. They were not like a bicycle unit or anything like that. They simply must have taken the bikes some twenty kilometers to the north of the village and arrived on them. Then they put them away, hugged with the locals, got some cakes and then they rode on. But afterwards, things started to take place in the village I really can’t explain or account for.”
Jiří Valenta was born in a family of village teachers in the village of Dolní Stakory nearby Mladá Boleslav in 1927. As an adolescent, he witnessed the occupation of the village by the Germans and later the welcoming of the liberators - the Soviet troops. After the war, he fell for the ideals of socialist ideology and became a member of a propaganda group agitating in the interest of collectivization. Among other things, he was a playwright of the theater in Hradec Králové and also a journalist. After the sanctions of 1968, he worked predominantly in manual professions, for instance as a tram driver or a stage technician. He authored a number of publications.
Pavel Michalik, Tomáš Hájek, Soňa Anna-Marie Fišerová
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