František Brabenec

* 1949

  • "Back then, just after the monetary reform, they made a raid at people who owned the property and those with trade licence in Pilsen. So daddy, although he did not work at that time, he had to surrender his shop in 1950 and worked manually in Škodovka with machine tools, even though he could not take part in the demonstration, because he was detained in the afternoon shift in Škodovka and spent more than one month in an investigative custody Borech. Then we were ordered to leave the apartment. We got replacement housing somewhere on the Polish border. At least one good thing about the fact that the mother was in poor health. Because she could not walk and was reliant on help from others, they agreed [to our request]. So we lost the apartment, but we could live with grandmother and grandfather. The father had to live outside Pilsen."

  • "As a small boy I remember it by now. We were at home and a police came to us to conduct a check. They went through the whole flat. I recall how I played with something, a purse or something and even that they took away from me. Then they made a list of stuff they confiscated, but made it only later on."

  • "It was supply at the time, it is logistics nowadays. At the time, it was all different. Today the main issue is the cheapest source. Back then horrible things were done to make it even happen. There were queues for a lot of things, there was no sand, no cement, and it had to be... I traveled a lot. Thanks to that, I went all through the country. For example, there was a shortage of hard-to-fill cardboards and we went for them all the way to Štúrovo. We had a 5,000-square-meter card stock a quarter and we needed twice as much. Mostly we did not just there with bare hands, we mostly brough a a carton of twelve degrees beer as greetings from Pilsen."

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    Plzeň, 20.07.2018

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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Never let yourselves be discouraged and fulfil your life goal

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František Brabenec
zdroj: archiv pamětníka, Jakub Anderle - natáčení 20.7.2018

František Brabenec was born on October 10, 1949 in Pilsen. After the February coup the communists first confiscated two fashion shops and leather goods stores from the family. The father, Frantisek Brabenec, had to take up a worker‘s job. In 1953 the unrest against monetary reform in Pilsen served as a pretext for further persecution of the family. Dad spent a month in custody and the authorities planned to move his family away to Broumov. Eventually a mitigation of the penalty was negotiated. František‘s mother, Milada Brabencová, née Fuchsová, had a child paralysis in 1952. She was moving only with difficulty and suffered the consequences of the disease until her death. She had to leave the flat with her son. They lived in a block of flats built by František‘s grandfather, in a small apartment with two rooms together with grandparents and one tenant. Dad was banned to stay in Pilsen for about a year and commuted to work and to his family from Březina near Rokycany. František graduated at the Secondary General School of Julius Fučík at the Odborářů Square, today‘s Nicholas Square. He did not finished studying medicine, supplemented his education with an economic course, and in 1971 he joined the State Bank of Czechoslovakia. After three years he moved to Stavoprojekt, a building company in the city of Pilsen. He was in charge of supplying construction activities, which was not easy in the 1970s and 1980s as there was general material shortage. Success stood in endurance, acquaintances, and „little gifts“. He did not want to join the communist party, so he could not work at the leadership positions. František liked to travel with his parents and also later with his wife and two sons. Most often they travelled to relatives in West Germany or Yugoslavia. He remembers the complications of crossing the border, which appear incredible from today´s perspective. The fall of the regime was welcomed with enthusiasm and with respect and admiration to the president, Václav Havel. Following the liquidation of the construction company in 1992, he set up a small confectionery shop in the Republic Square in Pilsen.