František Bauer

* 1957

  • "I remember exactly how the tanks came through Otovice from Hroznětín. We stood with father in front of the house and trying to see what was going on. In the morning grandmother sat by the radio, they played the hymn, she was crying, that she does not want to experience it again. It was stressful also for us children. The television stopped playing back then, it was not a good time, for us, and also for our parents. Us small ones did not understand it as much, but the stress and tension was also in us. " - "Tanks appeared in Otovice?" - "They did, there were full forests there. It was called the Stork's Nest and there they [the solders] had their gathering place. There is an old waterworks at the Stork's Nest and father used to have bees there. We went there to feed the bees and rode across the Russian barriers, we had to have special permission from them to be able to get there. And there were forests full of Russian soldiers there."

  • "In the morning you had to light a fire, heat the water in the copper boiler, that was about for two hours. The water had to be boiled, the tubs had to be prepared, everything around it. At dawn father always said, that we have to go begin early, so that we would not have to keep doing it until nighttime. At around seven or eight thirty the pig was stunned and steamed. The stew was sometime around ten or eleven o'clock. The stew got finished. The meat got ground up, was prepared and put into sausages. Around one or two o'clock the sausages started to be cooked and sometime around five o'clock everything was finished, everyone sat down for coffee and to talk after the pig slaughter. With the neighbors maybe some beer, maybe some liquor."

  • "After the year 1948 they took father's business license and he went to mandatory military service. He had to go to the Black Barons, because he was uncomfortable to the regime. I did not like it, when they liquidated his license. He was an anti-state element and for that he got the reward of the Black Barons. After his service he moved with his brother to Nejdek and from Nejdek he rode to Otovice, where there was a pub and a butcher's shop. Father got an offer from the local co-operative there to run the pub and shop. Mother lived directly in front of the shop in a small house and that was how they got to know each other."

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    Karlovy Vary, 11.05.2023

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They took father’s butcher shop and sent him to the forced labor military camps. But the trade continued in the family

František Bauer in a traditional butcher's uniform in the year 1973
František Bauer in a traditional butcher's uniform in the year 1973
photo: Archiv pamětníka

František Bauer was born on the 14th of September 1957 in Karlovy Vary. The families of his parents came to the Sudetenland after the Second World War looking for work. His father lead a butcher shop and a pub with his cousin, but the communists took the establishments from them in the year 1948. They protested against it and so he had to go serve in the forced labor military camps. The witness’s parents settled in Otovice, where they ran a pub and later a kitchen in the local concrete panel factory. His father, as a butcher, organized traditional pig slaughters in the village, the witness took over the trade after him and went to a trade school in Hroznětín to become a butcher. He then worked in the local meat factory. He was also passionate about hockey, which he played for Karlovy Vary in the youth categories. He got married in the year 1980, his son also later became a butcher. In the 90s the witness worked as a master butcher for the companies Prima and Pelant. In the year 2023 he lived in Karlovy Vary.