Ing. Karel Kužel

* 1946

  • “It was called the TITC, and it was a newly established organisation. Those were good times because it was something new, a new organisation, with new habits. It was performance-oriented, which was very unusual and refreshing during Bolshevism. There wasn’t much bureaucracy there, rather a spirit of enthusiasm. So those were good years there.”

  • “After the war they were allotted a house of some kind in Dolní Podluží near Varnsdorf. It was something that had been freed up after the Germans [were sent away - trans.], and they got it for rent. Why didn’t my parents stay there longer: my father got into a quarrel with the local national committee, and he was ‘actioned out’, as they called it, by the action committee of the National Front for his so-called ‘anti-peoples-democratic’ attitude, because he had refused to sign petition calling for the constitutionalisation of national committees. So Dad and his wife, who was already with child and already ill and who died in 1951 - in this kind of state the family was given a three-day notice to leave.”

  • “The radio I bought was a great purchase because I could use it to listen to both the Voice of America and Free Europe, which was jammed. You could actually tune it out sometimes. I took an active interest in jamming technologies and countermeasures. I knew that it could be jammed both by direct wave and by reflection. The reflected waves required the jammer to be the same distance from the transmitter that it was supposed to jam. Free Europe broadcast from Portugal, which was more than a thousand kilometres away from Czechoslovakia, so the reflected-wave jammers had to be positioned all the way in the Urals in Russia. So the reflected waves would clash right above our country. But that wouldn’t suffice for perfect jamming, so every larger city had its own jammers, which used direct waves. I liked hiking, so I’d set out for the weekend and get to places that were outside of the jamming area, and then in the evening I’d listen to Free Europe or something from my radio while tucked up in my sleeping bag, and that was very refreshing.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 03.03.2011

    (audio)
    délka: 04:10:25
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th century
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The fire on my desk gave us some sleepless nights and kept several stetsecs busy

Karel Kužel 1962
Karel Kužel 1962
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Karel Kužel was born on 24 July 1946 into a teacher‘s family in Varnsdorf soon after his parents moved to the Sudeten village of Dolní Podluží, which his father was assigned to. However, because he refused to sign a petition that constitutionalised national committees, the family had to leave the village at three days‘ notice. At the time, Věra Kuželová was pregnant and also seriously ill. Her premature death in 1951 was the result of the improper treatment of her scarlet fever, which she had contracted in the Terezín ghetto when helping to care for sick prisoners after the liberation in 1945. After their eviction, the family lived in Děčín; after his mother‘s death and his father‘s second marriage, they moved to Ústí nad Labem. In 1968 Karel Kužel graduated from the Faculty of Aviation at the Military Academy in Brno; he found a job in IT. He began his career at a chemical plant in Záluží, which boasted a French-made Gamma 140 computer. In 1980, when working at the Strategic IT Centre in Prague, he experienced an in-company incident that was investigated by State Security as possible sabotage. In 1991 he helped found Eurotel, the first mobile phone network company in what was then still the Czechoslovak Republic. In the recording, the witness describes everyday life under totalitarian Communism.