Karel Kafka

* 1946

  • "I got my first ID card when I was fifteen. I got my second ID sometime after the war. Third ID when I got married. Then I'm sure there was another ID card, because they are usually valid for five or ten years. And now in that year ninety-three, all of a sudden, I had all these documents, and I go with my wife to get the ID cards, and they say that there is some discrepancy in my nationality, that they can't give me an ID card. Imagine, I lived here for so many years and suddenly I don't get an ID?! So we searched and found a document by chance. It's a document granting Czechoslovak citizenship. The Regional National Committee in Brno grants, according to the article, to Jan Kafka, that was my father, living in Znojmo, born and so on, a former Austrian citizen. At the same time, his wife Antonia, née Müller, and his minor son Karel, born in Znojmo at the age of forty-six, acquire Czechoslovak citizenship. So actually I was Austrian for three years. Unfortunately, I have no pension as a result."

  • "And I have here, then you can even see how here in the square - I took this picture - how literally the ground was torn up around Ivan, the asphalt, tanks were driving over it. And I have this memory of when that time - I don't know how we found out that somebody wanted to tear down - now they wanted to do it too, when the events with Ukraine, when it started in the spring - they wanted to tear down the statue of the Red Army too. And there was already a rope or some rope around, there was VS truck, a truck, there were too many people. And suddenly from below, from the 'Krajzak', from the theatre, suddenly we heard shooting. In short, some 'Russians' were coming and shooting, fortunately into the air. I was there with my dad, guys, as my dad was fifty, fifty-five years old then, I couldn't catch up with him. We were running down the street home, it was scattered, it was such a fear all of a sudden when that volley came out, and we didn't know where it came from. So that's the memories of the '80s. We don't like to remember it because it wasn't easy for us."

  • "In Znojmo we experienced it. We met young, I was twenty-two and some other friends, and we had a place called "U Ivana" (At Ivan's) on Vítězství Square. There used to be a shop called U Buchala, now there's a pub there, a restaurant. Across the street there's this place. And there was a grocery store, and there we had a kind of a post, about five, six, maybe more of us. Where they from the upper gymnasium, the lower school didn't exist yet, they used to cycle us some leaflets and news that they learned - and we used to distribute it there. Well, then for those x number of years we absolutely couldn't talk about it, because if it came out, I don't think we would have stayed in education very much."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Znojmo, 28.11.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 39:42
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Suddenly we were so scared

Wedding photos of Mr. and Mrs. Kafka
Wedding photos of Mr. and Mrs. Kafka
zdroj: Archive of the witness

Karel Kafka was born on 1 August 1946 into a family of so-called Viennese Czechs who moved from Vienna to Znojmo shortly after the end of the Second World War. His grandfather, Jan Kafka, was a long-time chairman of the shoe association in Austria. He spent his childhood in Znojmo and after graduating from university he went to the army in Cheb. In the same week he got married. During the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, he and his friends handed out information leaflets on the streets of Znojmo, which were distributed in the building of the Upper Gymnasium in Znojmo by means of a cyclostyle. He also witnessed an attempt to tear down a statue of a Red Army soldier on Znojmo‘s square, to which the soldiers of the occupation army responded by shooting (fortunately into the air). An active sportsman, teacher and coach, he worked for many years at the Kravsko Primary School and in sports classes in Znojmo. Together with skiing enthusiasts in the 1970s they built a ski slope with a ski lift on the slopes of Boskovštejn hill. As a coach he achieved several successes, in 1973-1974 he won the Sportsman of the Year award in the category of Coach of the Year and several of his charges made it to the Czechoslovak national team. The profession of a teacher grew close to his heart and he was glad to be able to practice it. In 2022 Karel Kafka lived in Znojmo with his wife and his tortoise, that he has had for sixty-two years.