Petr Karlík

* 1938

  • "After the war everything was crazy. I remember a little bit about the Germans being displaced and the empty apartments. Some people even slept on the streets. It was terrible, the things I remember. In 1947, the displacement was more humane. Which meant that the Germans could take whatever they wanted with them. They loaded their things into freight cars and left even with their furniture, with everything. Like my grandmother, who was deported in 1947. I remember that when I was a little boy, we took her stuff in a cart to that station."

  • "My father’s mother was in Germany and he wanted to visit her, so he asked for it in the 1950s. They wouldn't let him and then she died. He couldn't even go to the funeral. That was in the fifties. In the sixties they might have allowed him to go to West Germany, but he would have had to get a foreign exchange pledge. My father still had a sister there, and in the late sixties he was allowed to visit her."

  • "During the war my grandmother moved back to Karlovy Vary. My parents lived in South Moravia. Right after the war, some Czechs took everything from her, even though she was seventy-five years old. She then lived with us in Teplice for two years until she was deported in 1947."

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    Praha Barrandov, 15.10.2021

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    délka: 01:18:07
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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My dossier said I come from a bourgeois background

During the high school-leaving exam, 1956
During the high school-leaving exam, 1956
zdroj: Contemporary witness's archive

Petr Karlík was born on February 5, 1938 in Teplice. Shortly after his birth, the family left Teplice due to the growing anti-Czech sentiment in the Sudetenland and moved to Kyjov in South Moravia. After the war they returned to Teplice. As a young boy, Petr witnessed the displacement of the German population, which also affected his grandmother Marie Karlíková, who was of German origin and who settled in Stuttgart afterwards. After February 1948, Petr Karlík‘s father and both his sons, including Petr Karlík, were, without any reason, given a dossier which said that they came from a bourgeois family. Due to his father’s work as a mining engineer, the whole family moved to Slovakia in 1949, first to Handlová, and four years later to Bratislava. In 1956, Petr Karlík was accepted into the Czech Technical University in Prague. What supposedly helped him was, that applicants from Slovakia were preferred at that time. After graduating he worked as an operating technician at a power plant in Holešovice for seven years and then for twenty-five years at the Energy Research Institute in Běchovice.