Josef Kuthan

* 1955

  • „The currency reform in 1953 affected them a lot. My parents were getting married at the time and I know they said that Dad took all his savings out of the bank to pay for the wedding. And that when he withdrew them, the currency reform came that morning and all he had money for were rings. Because in that bank they were changing 1:25 and cash was changing 1:50 and he had all that money in cash because he took it out for the wedding, so the currency reform hit them hard.“

  • „There was one stupid thing about it: as my grandfather, grandmother, my mother and aunt, they were still little girls at that time, evicted by the Germans during the Second World War, the farm was completely abandoned when they returned to it. And then they took, she offered - it was the American United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) - which offered favourable loans for farmers. So my grandfather took a loan from the UNRRA to buy cattle, because there was nothing at all. But then, after the coup, these debts were transferred to the bank Česká spořitelna. And when they had to leave the farm in 1951, the debt remained with them. Česká spořitelna kept collecting money from my grandfather and grandmother. And I remember, grandfather died in 1962 and then my grandmother, she died sometime in 1992, and when I disposed of the papers and such after her, she had a bunch of receipts from the post office in the drawer, where she paid the debt until 1976, one hundred crowns per month. Until 1976.“

  • „From 1943 my father was sent to Germany for forced labour, and in 1944, I don't know exactly when, he managed to escape from there and returned home here. And here, because he knew the region perfectly, he was quite close with the people here, he knew a lot about the region, so he got involved in resistance activities, in the partisan group Fakel, which operated here in Dobříšsko. But my father was not active in any combat activities, but his job here in that guerrilla organisation was... his job was to be the messenger. First of all, he knew the region perfectly from his work, from the state administration of damming streams, and he knew many people here. So he tried to somehow help and connect the individual articles of the Dobriš partisan organisation and find food and medicine and what needed to be done at that time.“

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    Pánkov, 23.04.2022

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    duration: 01:00:01
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The regime didn’t bother me much anymore, but my parents and grandparents suffered

Josef Kuthan, 2022
Josef Kuthan, 2022
photo: Post Bellum

Josef Kuthan was born on September 21, 1955 in Příbram as the only child of Josef and Jaroslava Kuthan. He spent his childhood alternately in Prague in Žižkov, where he also graduated from elementary school, and with his grandmother in Velká Lečica, near Dobříš. His father Josef was born in 1922 and was forcibly deployed in Germany during the war. He escaped from there in 1944 and joined the resistance in Dobříš as a link of the Fakel partisan group. After the war, he was the secretary of the basic partisan organisation in Dobříš for two years, before the communists dissolved it. Josef’s grandparents on his mother’s side were evicted by the communists from their farm in Dublovice in 1951. They got it back in restitution only partially after the Velvet Revolution. After primary school, Josef Kuthan trained as a car mechanic in Příbram and worked at the local Mototechná. In the mid-1970s, he completed his military service with the air force in Brno and in Prague - Kbely, where he served in the engineering flight service. He got married in 1978 and raised two sons with his wife. He completed a five-year secondary agricultural-technical school in Mladá Boleslav and worked as a technician and later as a workshop manager in an agrochemical company near Hostivice until the Velvet Revolution. After the revolution, he started working as a self-employed person, and now enjoys his pension in the settlement of Pánkov near Nové Knín.