František Štika

* 1948

  • "We were walking around town and I heard Czech. There were many, many cars coming back from the sea. They stopped there. And our government did that wherever they stopped, they had to go to the tourism agency and there they will get help, everybody. I was just walking around town and there was a group of Czechs and they didn't know what to do. I volunteered that I was Czech and can help them with what they needed. They were so happy to have someone take care of them and speak Czech. They didn't want to believe that there were Czechs in Romania too. They didn't know about us. So we went to the tourism agency to register and they told us what to do. There were four families with cars, coming back from the sea. At that time there were a lot of Czechs at the seaside in Romania."

  • "Old Oršava is under water. A new hydro-centre has been built and the old Oršava is no more. When I got there, the town was already there. But the streets were still full of mud, not paved, so it was ugly. Slowly, though, it all got done. Those years were awfully good then, until the seventy-fourth or seventy-fifth. Life was awfully good in Romania. It was warm enough, the city was new, everything worked well. The shops were new and full of all the food you wanted. Then, little by little, things started to... The bolt tightened, and tightened and tightened until it snapped. Then it got worse."

  • "They took us and picked the ones who were a little bit better. They gave us a function and we had to put them there... to get as many as possible." - "What function did you get?" - "I don't know how to explain it in Czech. I had one group, 32 soldiers." - "So you had a batch." - "How is it divided in the army... I got one regiment that I had to take care of, that I had to command and train." - "Did you receive something for that, or why?" - "They gave us somehow more. We had our room separately, we ate separately, not with the soldiers. We had it a little better than the soldiers."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Šumice, 15.09.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:11:42
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

They were cut off from their homes by the Soviet occupation. They were taken in by a Romanian Czech

František Štika v roce 2023
František Štika v roce 2023
zdroj: Paměť národa

František Štika was born on 3 June 1948 and grew up in the Czech village of Šumice in the Romanian Banat. He completed four grades at the local school and from 1959 continued his studies at the twelve-year school in Božovice. His father, Ferdinand Štika, worked as a teacher for several years, but spent most of his career as secretary of the national committee (municipality) in the neighbouring Romanian village of Lapušník. After graduating from lyceum and passing his high school diploma in 1966, he completed his compulsory military service, during which he became a member of the Communist Party of Romania. After his return, he worked briefly in the teaching staff in Lapušnik. In August 1968, he participated in several days of teacher training in Karansebes, where he offered help to Czech families stranded in Romania after the occupation of Czechoslovakia. In 1971, he became an employee of a savings bank in Orsava, where he started a family. At the time of filming (September 2023) he lived alternately in Oršava and Šumice.