I first tasted meat at the age of 11
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František Karel was born on July 5, 1934 in Prague into the family of František and Marie Karel, he had five older siblings. Both parents were marked by World War I. His mother, as a front nurse, lost her leg in the war and was then retired because of the disability, his father passed through the Czechoslovak legions in Russia, and the war traumas affected him psychologically. The family lived in Holešovice and faced financial and social problems. Frantisek knew what hunger was. From the first grade he secretly helped out in the factory warehouse for a few crowns, the father, who beat him, was afraid and he [Frantisek] spent more time with the boys on the street than at home. He recalls how his mother secretly treated a Jewish woman, how her brother fled Germany in an SS camouflage jumpsuit, or the first Soviet tanks in May 1945. In 1952, the Karel family moved to the borderlands to Velké Velena in the Děčín region, where they bought the farm in instalments and tried to make a living from agriculture, but due to ignorance and inexperience they almost ended up in prison because they were unable to pay compulsory payments. Frantisek received a 14-month suspended sentence, his brother was given 18 months probation. In Velena, František ended up alone, handed over the farm to the state collective and worked for a decent salary as a tractor driver. In order to pay off the debts left over on the farm as quickly as possible, he made extra money with part-time jobs. He first married in the 1960s, but the marriage soon fell apart. In the early 1970s he and his second wife settled in Litoměřice, where they both worked in agriculture, after her death he moved to Usti nad Labem, where he found a job in a chemical plant and married for the third time. He became a widower in 2013.
