Jiří Voženílek

* 1933

  • „The political advisor in Čedok summoned me and said: ‚Mr. Voženílek, there’s this stain on your dossier, isn’t it.’ And I told her: ‘Yes, that’s right. About the year sixty-nine.’ And she says: ‘They sent me your documents and it says there that you are not allowed to be in charge of a collective.’ I said: ‘Yes, that’s right too.’ And she says: ‘But you work in the power company. Please, my mother lives in Pražská Street and she is eighty and I would like to get a storage heater for her because every day, I have to go there. I need to bring her coal or wood, I light the stove and she keeps it going during the day. But they don’t want to allow me to install the storage heater because the network is allegedly too weak for this.’ Because I’ve worked in the power company for all my life, I knew how things worked. I went to the district supervisor and told him: ‘Laďa, I need at least four kilowatts to Pražská St. A storage heater.‘ We put it down to the book, he gave me a permit, stamped it and all, and I had taught at a trade school until that 1969 so I knew the electricians. So I went there, I gave them that permit for four kilowatts and they told me: ‘But we can do it only next week.’ I went to see the political advisor and told her: ‚It’s all sorted out and that I ordered the installation in her name for the next week, that they will come and install a new meter, peak and off peak, a contactor and that storage heater.‘ And she says: ‚You know what? That dossier of yours can get lost.’ And it was lost and I passed the tour guide exams.”

  • „I and my brother spent a lot of time running around, looking for something interesting. In the fields, we found a German car, it was abandoned. A sort of small lorry and there was probably a radio inside. And I found a case of tobacco and a case of schnapps there. We grabbed it. Maybe there were other things, too, but we were only interested in those. We took it all home. Our father was a chain smoker so he was happy about it. So we messed around and found another case. We opened the case. Accidentally, the local policeman was passing by so he threw us in the ditch and lay over us. There was an anti-personnel mine inside. He took us home and explained what a kind of hero he was. He was a hero and I and my brother got locked up in the basement so sinde that time, I don’t know much.”

  • „There were no fridges so mom had to boil the milk every time. Or else it would go sour in summer. That [Mrs.] Navarová, when she found out that there was milk left to cool and there’s skin on top which she loved, so she dug up the skin with her finger and ate the skin. Mom was terribly angry so they had a catfight and yelled at each other. The Navarová went and snitched on her because mom was a Sokol member and she was from Kolín where the Kmoch band was and that was something like the modern bands today, those polkas and Viennese waltzes. She used to go dancing there. There were Sokol balls and masquerades and all sort of social events. She used to sing the Kmoch song. And Kmoch had composed many marches, these were nice to sing and they were mostly sung by the Sokols. Parents were invited to the Gestapo. About two weeks. They were not too happy. When it was going on at the Gestapo, there were mostly people from the Sudeten in the lower positions, because when there was a higher ranking officer, for example from Berlin, he would speak perfect German. And he would perfectly tell you what to do, what to say and so on. But you, as a Czech, knew perfect Czech so all you could say was ‘I don’t understand you’. The Gestapo officer was bilingual and he talked with them but he was a decent person. The war has not started yet after all. He said: ‘Look, Mr. Voženílek, I’ll tell you a thing. You know who is sitting next to you? Your wife. Your wife sings Sokol songs and those are banned. If she wanted to sing them again, you will slap her on her face. I would not happy to beat her because she is a mother of two children.’”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    ED Liberec, 17.04.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:05:29
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The SA officer placed a bottle in front of my father and said: “We’ll exchange wives.”

Jiří Voženílek in the 1960's
Jiří Voženílek in the 1960's
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Jiří Voženílek was born on the 16th of March in 1933 in Hradec Králové. His family lived in Poříčí near Trutnov where his father, Jaroslav Voženílek, worked in the Poříčí East Bohemian Power Plant. Jiří’s mother Evženie was from Kolín where she apprenticed as a dressmaker. The family moved often. The first time they had to move when the German Army took over the Trutnov area as a part of Sudeten which was ceded to Germany after the Munich Agreement was signed in 1938. They had to move to the Protectorate, namely to Hradec Králové. The East Bohemian power company placed Jaroslav, Jiří’s father, in Všestary so they had to move again. After the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945, the family moved ot Liberec where Jiří Voženílek finished the basic school and then apprenticed at the Countryside Power company. As he excelled in mathematics, in 1953, he was asked to exchange money during the monetary reform in 1953. In 1968, he voiced his disagreement with the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies and had to bear the consequences. Even though he had passed the state exams for tour guides with the Čedok agency, he was not allowed to travel beyond the Eastern countries. In the time of the interview in 2023, he lived in Liberec.