Slavomír Klika

* 1951

  • “It happened already in April of 1968. We would write on the road, like cops being bastards and so. And one of us, who also had been lending a hand, would just turn us in.”

  • “My father also spoke about this roll call. There this column of Jews came and after they refused to reply in German, the warden took this iron can which he threw at them, killing three or four of them right on the spot.”

  • “After the war, how old was I? I don't know. Then this man started to come, from the agricultural co-op, he would count our chickens and tell us how many eggs we would give them. They would count our geese, so you would have to give them some. You had a pig, so you had to give them some lard. And milk, she also had to give this ration to them. As if you would walk the cows they wouldn't give you so much milk. So our grandmother had to go to a shop to buy some milk, so we could show them we produced it, and the eggs as well.”

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    Jindřichův Hradec , 17.07.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 01:37:38
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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My father had been held by the Nazis for years. Only after the Velvet Revolution did he talk about what he had been through

Slavomír Klika during his military service
Slavomír Klika during his military service
photo: Archiv pamětníka

Slavomír Klika was born on 5 February 1951 in Domanín, South Bohemia. His father, Slavomír Klika, had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 due to his involvement in sabotage in a factory in Čakovice. He had been imprisoned by the Nazis in the Pankrác Prison in Prague and then in the Small Fortress in Theresienstadt where he lived to see the liberation. He had been smuggling notes from the Theresienstadt fortress on which the book ‘Catacombs of Theresienstadt’ (‘Terezínské katakomby’) has been based. His mother, Marie, lived through the war on a family farm in Domanín. In the 1950s, his family had been forced to join an agricultural co-op. To meet quotas they had to buy eggs and milk at a local shop in Domanín. In the 1960s, his parents bought a house in Lásenice and had been working at the local agricultural co-op. Slavomír Klika had been working at the coop as a driver’s assistant and a driver, later, he got a job as a bus driver. In 1979, he joined the Communist Party as he had been promised a flat by the Party. In 2021, he had been living in the city of Jindřichův Hradec.