Karel Straka

* 1933

  • “We were marching through Komárno, and our impression there was that it was full of gipsies. We’re marching along, and suddenly we see a big gate and ramparts. The gate opened and we marched in between the ramparts. Then another gate opened, and another. We went through three gates into the central area, where the main courtyard was. There they lined us up and welcomed us. I don’t remember how it all was exactly, but it was a fortress built in the days of [Empress] Maria Theresa. The ramparts were I don’t know how many metres high. Things started there, that was something. They herded us into lodging houses, cold rooms, big rooms. The windows were one by one metre, and the walls were a good two to three metres thick. The beds were one above the other. I don’t exactly know now what went on next, but I think we went out into some courtyard, where there was a stack of straw. Everyone got a bed sack, and we had to stuff it with the straw. It had to be hard, firm, to keep together nicely. Then a perfectly made bed, it had to be like a chest, straight and even. We got nighties for the night. I thought to myself: Soldiers in nighties...”

  • “I don’t know how they found that option, but somewhere or other they managed to obtain a piece of wood, and they carved wooden pistols out of it. Completely primitive ones, but that was something for the boys to see. When the guard wasn’t looking, or when he moved off somewhere, mainly the children went to have a look there. And through the fence he gave a pistol for a chunk of bread. I remember that some of them even had a rubber band, that you could shoot with it as if. They helped themselves out like that, so they wouldn’t die of hunger, it was awful.”

  • “There were either refugees who were running from the approaching front, or German soldiers. The great hall was where they were accommodated. The kitchen was in the garden. When the Germans were there, we weren’t allowed to go into the kitchen. They let us taste their ‘eintopf’. In the field kitchen they had big cauldrons into which they threw everything possible, vegetables, meat, and they called that eintopf. Then the German soldiers left, and after a while, when the front moved on into Russia, there came Russian captives, who had to walk all that impossible distance from Russia. And they didn’t even have shoes, that just wasn’t a thing. They had their feet wrapped up in rags. It was winter. If you had seen the suffering. The floor of the great hall was strewn with straw, and they slept on that straw. So they were there, it was winter and it was freezing. It varied. The captives left, and a band of refugees arrived.”

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    Bludov, 19.03.2014

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He believed in God and ended up in the AEC

Karel Straka
Karel Straka
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Karel Straka was born on 17 September 1933 in Bludov. His family lived on the first floor of the National House, which was the Catholic cultural centre for the whole village at the time. The ground floor contained a pub with a great hall, which housed balls and theatre plays. During the war the great hall of the National House served as a lodging facility. In various times it accommodated Germans from the eastern countries, soldiers, refugees, and captives. As a small boy, Karel Straka came in touch with them quite frequently. After the liberation he was witness to the renewal of the cultural activities of Catholic associations in the National House, but only until the Communist regime came to power in 1948, when the associations were dissolved and the witness‘s family expelled from their flat. Soon after the local priest Oldřich Koutný together with several parishioners were stood before a show trial and sent to prison. The new priest, Alois Bubeník, collaborated with the Communist regime, and most of the faithful thus began attending church in neighbouring villages. Karel Straka was one such person, and for this reason when he began compulsory military service, he was sent directly to forced labour in the Auxiliary Engineering Corps (AEC). The witness still lives in his native village.