Remigius Haken

photo: archiv pamětníka
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Remigius Haken was born on the 4th of September 1937 in Sklíně in Volhynia in what was then Poland (today it is territory of Ukraine) as the eldest of seven children to his parents Josef and Helena, née Kyselová. The family lived on an estate which had 20 hectares of fields and two hectares of forest. During the Soviet occupation the family was on the lists for transport to Siberia. But they were saved by the German attack on the Soviet Union, which happened in June 1941. During the Nazi occupation of Volhynia his uncle Josef Kysela hid Jews in his old house in Lutsk. Shortly after the coming of the Red Army Josef Kysel was arrested by the NKVD and then spent four years in Soviet worker correction camps. While he returned to his family in Czechoslovakia, three years later he died due to terrible mistreatment. Several uncles of Remigius Haken were conscripted into the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps, which then later went side by side with the Red Army through the battle for the Dukla Pass and on the territory of Czechoslovakia. His father also volunteered into the Czechoslovak army, but he had an injury in his youth and lost a thumb, and the recruitment commission did not accept him into the army. In the year 1947 the family re-emigrated to Czechoslovakia. They then lived in Žatec, Aš, and in Lázně Libverda, where they took care of an estate with 12 hectares of fields. In the year 1948 they offered his father a position as the head of a state owned estate. After his experiences with the communist regime in the USSR he rather let go of the estate and moved with his family to Nové Město pod Smrkem, and then later back to Žatec. In that period Remigius Haken finished primary school and then studied at an industrial school in Chomutov. He later worked in the screw factory in Žatec. In the year 1960 he married Miroslava Žitná, whose family also came from Volhynia, to be precise from the village of Teremno (today part of Lutsk). The newlyweds moved to Šumperk, where they also brought three children into the world - Iva, Robert, and René. Remigius Haken then worked for almost 30 years as the head of the energy department in the national company Velamos Sobotín and after the fall of communism in the company Atis Zlín. As its employee he got to head the construction of several enormous boiler rooms in Russia, where he spent three and a half years. Back then soldiers were returning to Russia with their families from the former DDR, and new accommodations were being built for them. At the time of filming in the year 2023 Remigius Haken lived in Sobotín.