Ing. Josef Bauer

* 1951

  • “The firm was nationalized but the building remained co-owned by my father, grandfather, and my aunt. Well, and after they nationalized it, they came to see my dad at the beginning of the 1950s to ask him whether he would work for the town organization which dealt with funeral services and crematorium because it was falling into pieces under their management. Well, it is only with the benefit of hindsight that you realize how difficult it must have been for him. At first, they took everything from him, and then he went to work in his former company so that someone else profited from it and the service worked well.”

  • “Someone was going from their shopping and tomatoes were flying at the soldiers all the time. And you could see that the Russian soldiers had an order and were not allowed to do anything. But the atmosphere was tense sometimes, sometimes they pulled the machine guns off from their shoulders and started to point them at people. So I know that everyone... However, I did not see that they would fight with anyone or that a shooting would occur or that there would be dead people, I did not see it.”

  • “The nationalization was unclear and the town defended itself. So we came there to make a deal so that nothing was left for the town and we were amazed by it. There were some eight-hundred or nine-hundred coffins in one of the related buildings. All of them were the same, black ones with silver marks. One coffin after another. We had to take out a loan for it in 1990. They had around eight-hundred thousand coffins in stock back then, I mean in 1990. And we did not know what to do with them, so in the end, we burnt them. Because in 1991 or 1992, the bereaved people came and said: ‘We will choose a coffin.‘ So those were lying there and were used as firewood.”

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    Brno, 28.01.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 02:09:36
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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We went to a stationery shop and bought two reams of paper. And so we started to privatize

Josef Bauer in the first half of the 1960s
Josef Bauer in the first half of the 1960s
photo: witness´s archive

Josef Bauer was born on 2 September 1951 in Ostrava-Zábřeh. His mother Pavla, née Marková was a stay-at-home spouse and she later worked as an accountant. His father Josef, a Doctor of Law, worked as a clerk in Vítkovice Iron and Steel Works after the beginning of communism, but he could not work as a lawyer because of his inappropriate cadre profile. His grandfather Josef Bauer started a funeral service business during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the family lost the company shortly after the communists took over and the confiscation of properties followed in the 1950s. Josef graduated from Secondary Technical School and he earned an engineering degree at the Brno University of Technology in 1976. After his studies, he started working as a structural engineer and designer of steel structures at the Brno branch of Mill machinery factories (TMS), where he worked until 1989. The family´s confiscated property was returned in restitution after the Velvet Revolution. In the first half of the 1990s, he was a member of the privatization committee within the framework of the so-called “small-scale privatization”. Josef Bauer lived in Brno in 2022.