Ladislav Kváča

* 1933

  • "Then the Russians... I don't know if they recognized them, but I know they pulled... Because the Wehrmacht and the SS (Schutzstaffel) were two different units. And the SS [in an attempt to save themselves] had changed into Wehrmacht uniforms. I don't know if they [the Russians] knew them, or God only knows, but as a twelve-year-old boy I witnessed the Russians hanging them on a branch normally there. I saw that as a boy."

  • "The only thing I remember is that when we were crossing the equator, I was christened by Neptune on the ship, which was called Kościuszko, or Gdynia. That was quite a big ship at that time, because there were probably about 1100 or 1200 passengers. And on that journey we experienced a storm, twenty-four hours at sea. And the captain and I were the only two that could endure it, otherwise all the others couldn't take it. It's absolutely unknown to a normal person what it actually does to a person when you have ten-metre high waves or more, even though it was, as I say, a fairly large ship, yeah. So we just got through it."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Karlovy Vary, 28.04.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:35:38
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Sport and politics don‘t go together

Ladislav Kváča in the 1960s
Ladislav Kváča in the 1960s
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Ladislav Kváča was born on 16 May 1933 in Nová Sibřina, which is now part of Újezd nad Lesy near Prague. His father Václav Kváča worked as a butcher. In 1937 the whole family moved to Paraguay, where his father apparently intended to run a farm and export beef to Europe. At the end of 1938, however, they returned to Czechoslovakia at their mother‘s wish and spent the war in Újezd nad Lesy. In the summer of 1945 they moved to Karlovy Vary, where their father worked at repairs of the parts of the city damaged by bombing. Ladislav Kváča finished primary school in today‘s Milada Horáková Square, completed an apprenticeship and graduated from secondary school. He was not admitted to the Czech Technical University, so he took a job as an accountant in the uranium mines in Jáchymov. He actively played sports, he played hockey, did athletics, and later, in the late 1950s, coached a youth volleyball team. He worked for the Karlovy Vary Building Construction company and from the end of the 1970s he was an employee of the financial department of the Karlovy Vary District National Committee. He spent the last nine years before retirement in the export department of the porcelain factory in Dalovice.