Jana Kořínková

* 1937

  • “He ran it for about a year, but only three people were working there– They said they were going to lunch at noon and forgot the sledgehammer down in the quarry. Dad was climbing down to get it, and since it was after spring, everything was loose, so one wall slid on him. And that was in 1947, I remember that. I was ten years old when the stonemasons brought him home. He was covered in blood, and someone had to call an ambulance. But mom was fainting, grandma was crying, no one was there to do it. So I, as a ten-year-old child, had to go to the post office and call an ambulance. They took him to the hospital. I don’t know how much time he spent there. But then, when he arrived, he shut the company down. Even though he had a prosperous company– because I know that they used to transport the cobblestones all the way to Golčův Jeníkov. It was good, but he has also had enough of it. On the one hand, it’s good that he opted out because they would have taken it from him in 1948 anyway. That’s when they seized all the quarries that were private.”

  • “[The Unified agricultural cooperative] functioned poorly, then almost not at all. And that was when I attended the town school and composed poems. I used to say to my dad: ‘Hey, dad, I wrote a poem. Members of the cooperatives of Dolní město, what’s wrong with you? You don’t go to part-time jobs, the fields are rotting.’ He told me: ‘It’s nice, but please don’t say it in school.’”

  • “We had two cows, and I remember that. They were gathering cattle. They left us one of our cows and took the other one to the Kulíks. And I remember my mother and grandmother stood at the doorstep and cried terribly that their cow was being taken away. That’s how they gathered the cattle to have at least something there.”

  • “The Gestapo came here during that time and often selected people. Drahozal, Dušek . . . We were so scared that as soon as we saw them, we were already shaking, scared of where they were going. I don’t know if it was in the first or second grade when we saw them going to school - right into the building. We were afraid of who they were going there for. Then we found out that they were friends of our new teacher. They came to talk with her, and we were terrified of where they will go and who they will take away.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Havlíčkův Brod, 15.02.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:54:57
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Thankfully dad signed off on the business. Otherwise, the communists would have taken over the quarry

Jana Dušková during her studies in Havlíčkův Brod, 1950s
Jana Dušková during her studies in Havlíčkův Brod, 1950s
zdroj: witness archive

Jana Kořínková, née Dušková, was born on 23 June 1937 in the village of Dolní Město in Vysočina. Her parents, František and Antonie, got married in 1932, had a small homestead and farmed on about five hectares of agricultural land. Her uncle Josef Dušek was one of the successful architects and builders in Roztoky near Prague. The witness‘s father made a living as a stonemason, but after World War II, he set up a business and started mining granite in his own quarry. His business stopped for good after a landslide in the quarry which resulted in a severe accident. Mining in the stone quarry stopped for good, and it was later closed. The witness first attended a local school, then graduated from a town school in Lipnice nad Sázavou and finally attended a two-year economic study in Havlíčkův Brod. She was assigned to work at the stonemason boarding school in Lipnice nad Sázavou, and after marriage, she lived with her husband in Havlíčkův Brod. In the 1990s, she permanently returned to her native village and served as a sacristan in the Gothic church of Saint Martin for many years. At the time of filming, in February 2023, she lived in Dolní Město.