Joachim Mewes

* 1948

  • "I remember one thing when I was staying with my aunt between the ages of ten and twelve. So she arranged visiting my mother in the Pardubice prison. It was a prison that was more or less for political prisones, and there were also women. We had thirty minutes for the visit, and as I came in there and I was absolutely horrified. Her mother had bruised teeth and I didn't lie, little worms crawled through her nose like that. I wondered what kind of a witch she became and just wanted to get out of there. That outward impression trampled me so. And the moment we sat there, my aunt, mother and me, the prison guard came and started with her mother and argued with her for half an hour. Our time was up and we had to leave. But I remember that topic. My mother had been beaten before, she got in a fight. Whether it was her initiative, attack or self-defense, I have no idea. But there was a fight before that, and the officer knew about it. This was one part of the conversation I remembered, and in the other part, she accused her of not writing how many beads she had already woven on the stoves. The prison work consisted of how the cookers were with those ceramic beads. That's what the prisoners did, the kinds of heated up spirals."

  • "I still remember one beautiful situation, how all those May Day and all the festivities were obligatory. We were once called to the school to pick up the Russian flags there and to hand them over there as well. It was such a system that made attendance and presence in the procession obligatory. We couldn't avoid it, that we had to meet there at that school. But in that procession, we chose those communist children who were not, say, very understanding. And I said to one of them, 'Look, you can hold the banner for me, I want to tie a shoelace.' And he ended up with ten flags and had to carry them all back to school, the exmplary communist son. I don't know if he acted on his own initiative, as he was a real fan of communism. After the revolution (in 1989), he would still proudly show us his communist party ID."

  • „Two groups of people gathered in Karlovy Vary after the war. It was the Communists who were building socialism and helping on the border with much enthusiasm, and then those, who were sent there as a punishment. And my mom and I found ourselves in this mixture. However, she immediately lost the job she found after three months, because the framing was being perfected and they found out that she was politically inappropriate, so they fired her. We have worked hard enough in early socialism. Sometimes, for example, I did not eat for three days, not to mention the absence of any washing, my mother did not have any money to pay the rent and elektricity; the toilet and water were somewhere in the hallway. It was quite a critical situation overal and she was hopeless, she couldn't find anything. We fought like this for four years. I had the advantage that because she had to worry about finding a job somewhere, she didn't have a husband, so I was alone most of the time. I decided a lot about my own course of the day and developed such a strategy that I always kept out of my peers, who always asked me why I didn't go to school. I used to skip school, and during the day when the stream of children went to school, I seemed to follow them, and then I turned and spent the whole morning somewhere in the woods or in the fields, eating raw potatoes and I was just fine.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha 4, 15.08.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 01:41:47
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Praha 4, 11.09.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 02:29:45
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

My mother sent me to beg to the colonnade

Joachim Mewes recording photo made in 2019
Joachim Mewes recording photo made in 2019
zdroj: Jan Holík

Joachim Mewes (born Jaromír) was born to a single mother of Jewish origin, Edita Rindlerová, on March 4, 1948 in Bratislava. Father Humberto Mewes lived in Chile. After February 1948, the witness‘s mother was persecuted and imprisoned as a Communist Trotskyist. His future life then took place in orphanages. After reaching the age of six, after their mother‘s release, they both moved to Karlovy Vary, where they lived literally in poverty. The mother lost her job and everything resulted in his re-imprisonment and his transfer to an orphanage. He then studied at a graphic school. In 1968 he went to Switzerland, where he applied for political asylum. He saw his father for the first time in his twenties. After 1973, there was a military coup in Chile by General Pinochet, with which he did not sympathize. He broke with civilization and lived in the Peruvian jungles with the Indians for some time. He was interested in their spirituality and finding inner peace. After returning to civilization, he continued in the profession of graphic artist, got married and had a son and two daughters with his wife. In 2019 he lived alternately in Hamburg and Prague.