Josef Kosák

* 1942

  • "I was weaned on Free Europe and the Voice of America, which my dad also listened to. He was still listening to German London Rundfunk. It spoke loudly and then went quiet again and was not heard at all. My brother and I used to push each other there, and dad could not understand because of that, so he always got up and gave us some beating. I was weaned on Free Europe, which was then the Western radio for the East. I listened to it in the hostel, we talked about everything. I experienced politics very actively. Before 1968, I was also in KAN - the Club of Engaged Non-Partisans, I took part there too."

  • "My father had problems. But due to the fact that he lived in a mixed marriage - the mother was Czech, the father German, and they had three minor children, so the father was one of the few. The Germans were concentrated in the former brick factory in Strakonice. Such a camp was formed there, where the Germans stayed and worked. They were forced to walk accompanied by soldiers, patriots and partisans, I know it from story-telling. They walked around the area where people who fell or were shot during the war were buried. They dug them up and then had to transport them to the official cemetery where they were buried."

  • "Then I remember the raids, rather they were overflights of Anglo-American planes that flew in the protectorate area and destroyed various factories of a military nature that were there, and so on. Those are my first memories. Whenever there were sirens, we ran to the basement and hid there in the basement. One more interesting thing – after the war, our family learned that in the house where they lived in Nuremberg, all their acquaintances had perished there. That house was destroyed by bombing. We only survived due to the fact that my parents returned to the Czech Republic. I don't know how it would develop, only God knows, of course. But the fact, that mom wanted to come home, helped a lot."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Liberec, 25.04.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:14:44
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

It‘s never too late for anything

Josef Kosák in Malá Fatra mountains, 1970
Josef Kosák in Malá Fatra mountains, 1970
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Josef Kosák was born on April 14, 1942 in Nuremberg, Germany, into a mixed marriage. His father was German and his mother Czech. In 1944, he and his family moved from Germany to Strakonice. He recalls how, at the end of the war, he and his family often hid in the basement from air raids. As a child, Josef was often sick and spent a lot of time in the hospital. In 1948, he started elementary school in Strakonice. After the communist coup, the family began to experience hardships from the regime because of the father‘s German origin. The Kosáks did not have enough finances, the father could not perform his original profession and worked in menial positions. At the time, the entire family, including Josef Kosák, was being monitored by the State Security (StB). In the second half of the fifties, Josef‘s father died. Josef attributes this, among other things, to the fact that his father was bullied by the communist regime. In 1960, Josef successfully graduated from secondary technical school. After graduation, Josef got a job at the Stavoprojekt company in Sezimov Ústí. There he met his future wife, Libuší Kahovacová. Later they raised two sons together. He lived in Liberec since 1970. His whole life was dedicated to sports - running, rowing, cycling, hiking and cross-country skiing in the winter. In 2022 he lived in Liberec.