ThDr. Karel Kuc

* 1939

  • “He was taken from the front to a hospital in Rostock so my mum and his younger sister, who spoke German fluently, went to the hospital and he suffered so much that my mum was just praying to God to take him. He was in critical condition. He was clinically dead, they took him to a morgue and he surprisingly woke up. They also cured him in the hospital, but it was the end of the war, so they let him in reserve and he was not in the front anymore. We did not meet him after that.”

  • “... He was also arrested and placed in a barn with Jews. Imagine the horror - they locked the barn and the Germans, or it might have been someone else, set it on fire. All of them burnt to death there and my uncle Matějka was with them. His son did not want to stay in Poland even though they had built a bakery with his father who burnt there to death. He wanted to leave Poland. We were perhaps the first ones to flee Poland. We rode through a forest, were stopped by a group, and had to pay them. We carried some things in the wagon, we had to give them some things from the wagon and moreover some money. So they let us go, we arrived in Łask and we had to bribe again to be able to leave the station. Then we finally arrived in Bohumín and from there we went to Suchdol nad Odrou where there were already some Czech families.”

  • “I went to have a beer with the guys also after the church services. After the first year, I felt an extraordinarily strong calling from God which I had to respond to. I responded with prayer. I asked the Lord Jesus to forgive me because my life in the brigade had not been completely all right. was ashamed of some things, of almost ignoring him. I expressed it in the prayer and that was the moment of the conversion. We call it conversion, rebirth. Suddenly, a person wakes up in their conscience and begins a spiritual relationship with God. It started to show itself also in the barracks. I went to have a beer with the guys but the desire to go to the congregation for church services was stronger than the desire to chat over a beer.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 29.04.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 04:12:24
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I wished to repeat one memory from my childhood. Reunion with father

Karel Kuc in 1942
Karel Kuc in 1942
zdroj: the witness

Karel Kuc was born on 15 May 1939 in Pożdżenice near Zelów in Poland. His mother Lydie was Czech from the family of Josef Reichert who had come to Poland in the 19th century. Karel´s father Robert Kuc (he wrote his name as Kutz in Poland, later his name was written as Kuc) came from a German family that lived in Zelów. The family was religious, they were Baptists. They only spoke Czech at home. At the beginning of the war, the father convinced the mother to sign the so-called Deutsche Wolksliste (German nationality) in an effort to protect the family. Robert Kuc had to join Wehrmacht in 1942. He was seriously wounded, survived but never came back home. Lucie Kucová and her sons escaped to Czechoslovakia to escape the harsh anti-German repression and settled with other relatives from Poland in the western border region, in Jankovice, where they bought a farm of twenty-two hectares on hire purchase. In the 1950s, the family faced pressure to join the united agricultural cooperative, at last, they gave up their farm and moved to Brniště. Karel could not study because of political reasons. He worked in a flax processing factory from the age of fifteen. Later he worked as an excavator operator and locksmith, he joined the army in Bratislava in 1959. There, he experienced a religious conversion, which led him to study at the Faculty of Theology in Prague, where he prepared for his career as a preacher from 1963 to 1970. He attended the Baptist congregation in Prague Na Topolce. In 1969, he managed to find his father who was living in England and who had been missing for three years and he brought him back with failing health to his family in Czechoslovakia where he died in 1977. Karel Kuc worked as a preacher in Prague, Teplá, Cheb and in the area of Litoměřice. During his career as a preacher, he faced the state supervision to which preachers were subject. He and his wife Růžena got married in 1971 and they raised four children together.