Ivo Čagánek

* 1937

  • "In the morning I went to work as an operating chemist for six hours. We could already feel in the trolleybus that something was happening. We'd come to work, the planes were already flying, those Andules, or whatever they were called, carrying those tanks and heavy weapons material. And there was a commotion in the factory. There was a radio in the factory, there was a radio, and it was an illegal transmitter. Then the tanks started coming in, and the people, as they saw the tanks coming in, and as they were milling around, the signposts started turning. And they wanted to go to Otrokovice and they didn't know what to do. It was all reversed."

  • "Back then we went abroad as experts. We went to Africa to help start or maintain production. I went to Ghana three times. When I was thirty, when I was forty and then when I retired. The first time we ran a shoe factory there, I ran a small rubber factory. The second time I went to the capital, Accra, we always rotated there after two years and maintained production there. That was called Ghana Rubber Products. The Ghana Rubber Factory, where they made mainly beach sandals between the toes, was kind of a folk shoe. Well, some of those shoemakers' bellows, rubber car mats and things like that. Then, I was in my sixties and a colleague needed a replacement, so I replaced him for a year. But in those years, '77-79, it was still a bad time, but they needed somebody to be there, and the Communists liked dollars, and they were combing us then. When they went through that Polytechna, half my salary went to Polytechna, and I got the rest."

  • "There was shooting in the streets, bullets were flying. We peeked through a crack in the door to see what was going on and had to crawl into the basement. When the army was there, only then could we come out. We lived in the cellars for about a fortnight. All of us, the whole neighborhood. That was it."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Zlín, 26.08.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 01:35:34
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The communists liked the dollar, so they robbed us

Ivo Čagánek in 1950s
Ivo Čagánek in 1950s
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Ivo Čagánek was born on 17 July 1937 in Zlín. He grew up in Uherský Brod until he was fifteen. His father Ferdinand worked as an accountant in a trade credit union, his mother Marie took care of the household. His uncle was Rudolf Čagánek, a member of the Czechoslovak RAF squadron during the Second World War. In April 1945, he experienced gunfights during the liberation of Uherský Brod. After 1948, his father was convicted in a political trial, imprisoned and then sent to the uranium mines in Jáchymov. Also after the February coup, his grandfather Josef Kunčík, a veteran of the First World War, lost his own bakery. In the 1950s Ivo Čagánek graduated from the Secondary Industrial School of Chemistry in the then Gottwaldov. After completing his compulsory military service in Brno and Znojmo, he joined the Svit factory. As an employee of Svit, he used to travel to Ghana on business, where he helped to introduce rubber production. In January 1989, he witnessed the events of Palach Week in Prague. At the time of the interview (2020) Ivo Čagánek was living in Zlín.