Jiří Kameníček

* 1937

  • “The end of war was just terrible in the house, where we had lived. My mum´s sister was farming there, with her husband, uncle Karl. On the 5th May (6th May – author´s note) a Russian guard arrived and came to our house. Meanwhile, on the nearby railroad line, a German armoured train retreated westward. The Germans stopped as they saw the Soviets arriving. A firefight started with the Russian soldiers who were with us inside. The Germans had a heavy technique, and even a tank went off the train. The Russians were in a minority and eventually lost. The house was burned down and the Germans chased us out of it. The following night and the next day we survived in the melioration ditch. There was shooting above our heads, and when everything subsided, we returned to the village to uncle´s burnt building. So we bowed to our other uncle, Zboril, where we stayed for a while. It was terrible back then.”

  • “Many of his close circle was called there as witnesses. Dad got three years old in 1957. He was to be released in the autumn of 1960s. I was already in the army. They opened a new trial at that time and the farmers in Haná, Strid, Böhm and Michalek, were also included... Finally Dad and Böhm were given fifteen years (Böhm eleven years – author´s note) and so it went on and on. A farmer called Gottwald from Střelice got the least, three years (one year – author´s note). They were about ten or twelve (eleven – author´s note). It was an attempt to destroy the known representatives of the farmers, so that the collectivization went on better.”

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    Bohuňovice, 23.02.2018

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    duration: 01:45:12
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I am rather worried by the growing populism. I admit I can hardly sleep now.

Jiří Kameníček
Jiří Kameníček
photo: archiv pamětníka

Jiří Kameníček was born on 20 May, 1937 in Brno. At the end of WW2, due to the Allies air raids at the city, the family moved to their relatives in the village of Březce (today’s part of Štěpánov). They experienced dramatic fight at the final days of war, when the house they were hiding in, ended up burning in flames. Next the family returned to the father´s native place in Moravské Loděnice (today’s part of Bohuňovice), where the father, Ladislav Kameníček, took over the hereditary farm with twelve hectares of fields. As a member of parliament of the Constitutional National Assembly for the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party the father indirectly participated in the events leading to the February 1948 communist putsch. Back then he was in opposition to the communist party, which he paid for harshly in the upcoming years. He was taken away the parliamentary mandate, expelled from the teaching staff of VŠZ Brno, and in 1949 he got imprisoned for nine months without any trial and finally sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Persecution also hit his family. The son Jiří, who was an excellent student, graduated with a diploma in the industrial school shortly after his father’s arrest, but his brother Ladislav had been expelled from another industrial school. The witness was not accepted to college due to wrong class origin. He subsequently began working in an engineering factory in Uničov, where he worked until he retired. Jiří Kameníček kept demandingto study at the college and a year after the release of his father, he finally received a recommendation. He then went on to distant study at the BUT Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, which he successfully completed in 1972. Since 2000 Jiří Kameníček and his wife have lived in Bohuňovice.