Remigius Haken

* 1937

  • "After the annual farming, after the harvest in the year 1948, when we harvested a rich harvest, we used the borrowed tractor, we beat the grain, harvested an amazing harvest of potatoes, and with the help of the girls' dormitory, where we paid in potatoes - back then three boys in leather showed up, I can remember it as if it happened yesterday, and they told father, that they can see, that he is a good farmer, and that he secured the family and everything and that they had a proposition for him, that they want to establish a state-owned estate and that they would make him the head and that he would be well off and that he would get people to help, who he will lead, so that it would lead to something. That the collective farming is an amazing thing. Father, when he heard about collective farming, then at that moment his brain apparently fogged over and in front of me he said, and they heard him well: 'I will leave all this for you here, as it lies and stands, only let me and my children go.' He remembered well, what happened in Russia. When they established a kolchoz there, then nobody was allowed to leave that kolchoz. Not even children could go to a different village to school, because everyone had to be in the kolchoz, in the municipality, and work there. And so it really came to it, that he started looking for accommodations. We found a house in Nové Město pod Smrkem, where we bought it with help from the family and father started for the first time going as an employee to a textile factory. He was not used to it, because he always decided everything by himself, what he will do, how to farm."

  • "He was transported to Siberia. He was in a gulag and he took part in the construction of the Volga-Don canal and he told me: 'You know, how they built the Volga-Don canal? He, who had a shovel, that was already a better person, who had a wheelbarrow for taking dirt, he was somewhere completely elsewhere.' They carried the dirt in normal stretchers. And that is how the Volga-Don canal was built. Uncle Kysela ran away from that camp three times, because he could not come to terms with it. The first time, before they apprehended him, he even jumped into a cesspool and he thought, that they would not find him there. When it ends, he would come out. But the dogs barked him out, and he was dirty, foul-smelling, and so they threw him into a communal room, where there were forty other prisoners. He said, that what he experienced as a smelly Czech from those Ukrainians, who were there, that I cannot even imagine it. Despite that he did not give up and he wanted to run away through Japan. But again he was unsuccesful. Only then before the year 1950 they let him go and allowed him to travel back to Czechia and he was a total psychological and physical ruin. When I started to ask him, how he experienced it, then for a while he talked coherently, but then he started to be nervous, and then he got an attack. And aunt always said: 'Please do not talk with him about it again.' And he lived here only about three years."

  • "I have to say, that this year was for our family a day of liberation. The cleaning lady, who worked for our grandfather as a charwoman and later under the Bolsheviks grandfather had to let her go, she then worked at the selerad, which was the Ukranian municipal bureau, and one day she came - it was just before the outbreak of war - and she said: 'I saw lists of the Hakens, Pichrts, and Zárybnickýs, which are intended for the transport to Siberia.' And with how the war came to be, then everything went quiet."

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    Šumperk, 07.03.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 03:06:09
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I could not understand, how they could treat living human beings like this

Remigius Haken, 1950
Remigius Haken, 1950
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Remigius Haken was born on the 4th of September 1937 in Sklíně in Volhynia in what was then Poland (today it is territory of Ukraine) as the eldest of seven children to his parents Josef and Helena, née Kyselová. The family lived on an estate which had 20 hectares of fields and two hectares of forest. During the Soviet occupation the family was on the lists for transport to Siberia. But they were saved by the German attack on the Soviet Union, which happened in June 1941. During the Nazi occupation of Volhynia his uncle Josef Kysela hid Jews in his old house in Lutsk. Shortly after the coming of the Red Army Josef Kysel was arrested by the NKVD and then spent four years in Soviet worker correction camps. While he returned to his family in Czechoslovakia, three years later he died due to terrible mistreatment. Several uncles of Remigius Haken were conscripted into the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps, which then later went side by side with the Red Army through the battle for the Dukla Pass and on the territory of Czechoslovakia. His father also volunteered into the Czechoslovak army, but he had an injury in his youth and lost a thumb, and the recruitment commission did not accept him into the army. In the year 1947 the family re-emigrated to Czechoslovakia. They then lived in Žatec, Aš, and in Lázně Libverda, where they took care of an estate with 12 hectares of fields. In the year 1948 they offered his father a position as the head of a state owned estate. After his experiences with the communist regime in the USSR he rather let go of the estate and moved with his family to Nové Město pod Smrkem, and then later back to Žatec. In that period Remigius Haken finished primary school and then studied at an industrial school in Chomutov. He later worked in the screw factory in Žatec. In the year 1960 he married Miroslava Žitná, whose family also came from Volhynia, to be precise from the village of Teremno (today part of Lutsk). The newlyweds moved to Šumperk, where they also brought three children into the world - Iva, Robert, and René. Remigius Haken then worked for almost 30 years as the head of the energy department in the national company Velamos Sobotín and after the fall of communism in the company Atis Zlín. As its employee he got to head the construction of several enormous boiler rooms in Russia, where he spent three and a half years. Back then soldiers were returning to Russia with their families from the former DDR, and new accommodations were being built for them. At the time of filming in the year 2023 Remigius Haken lived in Sobotín.