Jiří Kräussl

* 1939

  • "My father refused to cooperate with the fascists, so he was sent to Germany twice for forced labor so that he would come to his senses, but he never did in this direction. For the third time, they decided to punish him severely and sent him to the front in a criminal company to clear minefields. Of course, it was only a matter of time when he would die there, because such work was a death sentence. The year 1945 came, it was absolutely strange, because we were relieved that fascism against us had ended. We believed that there would be a fair deal with our family. It was a huge mistake. Because for most of the confiscators, German nationality was a major fault. Nobody cared about political activity at all."

  • "My mother didn't give up and she persuaded her mother - he was the grandmother's son, that we would all go see him. Including us children, we went from Klášterec to Prunéřov to find out if our uncle, his name was Josef, if he had survived by chance. We were walking around the fence for quite some time and our grandma kept shouting, 'Josef, where are you, Josef!' Suddenly, to our surprise, one of those punished - standing with his back to the fence we were at - turned slowly and said, 'Mom, don't you recognize me?' He used to be a dark-haired, curly-haired man, and by the morning he had hair like I have now."

  • "It started that always a new load of people arrived, which was divided into a circle of ten families. First, they urged everyone to hand over all the documents, especially about the property. Then they re-examined everything, and when they found something, they physically punished the person on the spot. We were incredibly lucky because our grandmother was able to sew the most important documents for us to the bottom of the straw bag, and they didn't find it. That's the moment thanks to which I can talk here. We permanently have such a document. "

  • Celé nahrávky
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    České Budějovice, 28.11.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 01:51:43
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The fault was German nationality, not the political activity

Jiří Kräussl
Jiří Kräussl
zdroj: archive of the witness

Jiří Kräussl was born on April 27, 1939 in Klášterec nad Ohří into a German family. His parents owned a small shop in the nearby settlement Útočiště. As a convinced social democrat, his father Franz rejected Nazi ideology. He was taken to forced labor twice, then taken to the Wehrmacht, where he served in a criminal company. He died clearing minefields. After the war, the widow and her three sons were to stay in an internment camp, their property was confiscated and they were deprived of their civil rights. After the dissolution of the camp in 1946, the family found housing in Klášterec nad Ohří. In the summer of 1947, the train took the Kräussl‘s with other families to Příbram, where people could take the Germans as work labor. After three years of working for the forester in Dobříš, his mother managed to get a job in the Dobříš sanatorium and find an apartment where the family moved, and they were finally able to have a normal life. Jiří, like his twin brother, trained as a car mechanic in Ústí nad Orlicí. They returned to western Bohemia, to Kadaň, where Jiří got married in 1964. He and his wife Jana had a son, Jiří, and a daughter, Jana. Throughout his life, Jiří tried to achieve redress and wrongful confiscation of property. To date (2020), the family has not received any compensation or apology. In 2020, the witness Jiří Kräussl lived in Kadaň.