Josef Blinka

* 1954

  • "My father never had a good attitude to it. Neither did my mother. On the contrary, my mother used to say that some people should be severely punished for their many actions in the 1950s. From my father's sister Anna, née Blinková, then married to Farka, her daughter and my cousin Jiřina Farková was jailed together with the custody for about thirteen years. So, the attitude to the Communist Party was negative."

  • "My mom said that when martial law was in effect and she went shopping, and as she went shopping, it was sometime early in the morning, that a patrol of German soldiers rushed at her, and that a young soldier immediately pointed a bayonet at her and more or less stabbed her here between her breasts, meaning that she had a scar there. But there were more cases like that."

  • "Between eighth and ninth grade, perhaps in ninth grade, I was in a class where we hardly learned Russian. In other words, the teacher somehow did not go through it, so we always did some homework, which were there. I remember when the Russians were passing through Dolní Bečva, they always threw out leaflets, and we as boys would pick it up and throw it in the garbage cans or in a pile or burn it. Often the Russians would stop the GAZs or the cars and then chase us through the forest, telling us that we could not do that."

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    Horní Bečva, 12.03.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 02:24:26
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Shut up, boy, and mind your job!

Josef Blinka in 2021
Josef Blinka in 2021
zdroj: Fotografie byla pořízena při natáčení v roce 2021

Josef Blinka was born on 31 January 1954 in Horní Bečva as the penultimate of ten siblings. His father Jan Blinka came from an agricultural family from Horní Bečva, was apprenticed in a construction company and participated in the building of the local dam. Josef‘s mother Božena Blinková, née Rárová, came from a family of a manorial gamekeeper from Horní Bečva. The family experienced dramatic moments during the World War II, as most of the people from the region were involved in helping the partisans. At the end of the war, Horní Bečva was to suffer the same fate as the burnt villages of Prlov and Ploština, but due to the fast-advancing liberating Red Army, the Nazis on the run did not make it. Josef was apprenticed as a knitting machine mechanic in Jihlava, where he subsequently passed the maturita exam. He got a job in the textile factory Loana Rožnov, where he changed many positions and even became the head of the local trade union. At the beginning of the 1980s, he was investigated by the police because of a denunciation that he was in possession of religiously oriented samizdat. Josef Blinka also helped formulate a local petition for religious freedom during the 1980s. In 1994, he was elected the mayor of Horní Bečva and served in that position for twelve years. He was then a deputy mayor there until 2018. His lifelong hobby is collecting oral history with ties to his native region. Josef Blinka was instrumental in building the partisan trail in the vicinity of Horní Bečva, where he was still living in 2022.