MVDr. Jiří Rožek

* 1946

  • “They came to us, saying they wanted to check if Dad had any grain stashed away; so they forced a seventy-year-old man [the witness’s grandfather - ed.] bail out sheaves from the threshing barn, and they stood there by the thresher, hands on their butts, waiting to see if a sack would appear. Then he took the pitchfork and jabbed at the pile to see if there were any sacks hidden there - a hideous experience it was when I saw that. He had to keep bailing out the sheaves, an enormous load of them, and they stood there just like the Gestapo, really.”

  • “I remember how it was. They took a hay wagon - her brother Josef Nechvíle drove up to help from up at The Freezes where he lived, a hill about a kilometre away; he came with horses and a hay wagon, and we loaded it with all we could fit – some cupboards, beds, duvets, clothes, like in that film All My Compatriots [a famous Czech film about rural injustice during Communism - trans.] – it was just the same. There was a bloke from the local national committee standing there to make sure we didn’t take anything that wasn’t on the list; we drove off with what we had, and that was that.”

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Honour your father and mother

 Rožek Jiří
Rožek Jiří
zdroj: Pamět Národa - Archiv

Jiří Rožek was born on 23 July 1946 in Osík near Litomyšl. His mother died shortly after his birth, and so he initially lived on the family farm with his father, older brother, and grandparents. In 1950 his father married again, and two years later the couple had a daughter. At the time there were several farmers in Osík who tended to their own estate, including the Rožeks. The harsh times of the collectivisation brought several days of interrogation and custody for his father, Jan Rožek, and persecution of the whole family. The oppression culminated in a house search directly witnessed by the eight-year-old Jiří. His father was accused of failing to fulfil delivery quotas and sentenced to 10 months of prison, the confiscation of property and citizenship rights, a five-year ban on entering his native village, and a lifelong ban on agricultural work. The family had to move immediately. His father was interned in a camp in Boreč near Mladá Boleslav, from where the prisoners were taken by lorries to the uranium mines. When Jiří Rožek wanted to study, the headmaster declared that due to the class and political unawareness of his family, he would have to opt for a vocational school. However, he managed to switch to a secondary agricultural school with graduation certification in his second year, and after completing that he enrolled at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Brno in the late 1960s. He married in 1969, graduated in 1972, and then underwent mandatory military service for one year in Vimperk. He began working as a vet at Agropodnik in Šebetov near Boskovice, where he was repeatedly but unsuccessfully pushed to join the Communist Party. After the Velvet Revolution his father was fully rehabilitated; their fields were returned, as was the farm house in a bad state of repair, for which they had to pay out the interim owner. Jiří Rožek still has a private veterinary practice in Boskovice.