Josef Kužela

* 1945

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  • "In 1990 I got what is called an authorization. I had to have it. In terms of designing, because I was interested in designing houses when I was teaching, just for information. I used to wake up at three o'clock and I was drawing until six o'clock. Practically, as they say, with a rested head and then only then I would get on the bus and go to school. Because I was teaching the practice, so it was mostly from my experience, so there wasn't any theoretical preparation necessary. So it was, you could say, like a top-up. Just for the record, I have about a hundred and forty houses in Vlčnov and, outside of that, another seventy outside."

  • "That is, those who had less land, around two hectares, or who did not have the possibility to farm independently because they did not have the horses, they did not have the draught power, they did not have the equipment, but those who had around five hectares or more, well, they stayed, if they could, they stayed. So, that's how it went, I guess. My father was also an avid hunter. In that year about fifty-three, fifty-four, all his guns were taken away. He had a rifle, he had a shotgun, he had a small-bore rifle, well, he also had a very fine dog, a brown dog, with ears, called Brok. A chasing dog that brought in rabbits. And then he died mysteriously after the hunt. I think he was poisoned, or I don't know. So that's how it went."

  • "Practically, agriculture was heading towards collectivisation. That means that the culminating year of those leaders was 1960. We were affected by it, but we were coming of age and it affected us in the sense that we were experiencing the end of that private agriculture, that small-scale agriculture. So, for example, I remember in 1953 there was already a kind of persuasion into the JZD. And they were even coming, because we were sleeping down there in that one room, friends were coming. Even from the Brod companies, from Zbrojovka, and they persuaded my father to join the JZD. So it was always during the night hours. Of course, we pretended to be asleep, but we heard."

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    Vlčnov, 08.04.2025

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    duration: 01:39:29
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A man is rich by what he does for others

Lance corporal Josef Kužela
Lance corporal Josef Kužela
photo: archive of a witness

Josef Kužela was born on April 26, 1945 as the second of twins on the day of the liberation of the village of Vlčnov, at the moment when Romanian soldiers were pushing the German occupiers out of the Vlčnov hills with artillery fire. The doctor who was summoned to the scene spent long minutes nursing the unconscious newborn. The mother was saved after a complicated birth by a Romanian military doctor who happened to find accommodation in their cottage. The family farmed six hectares of fields until the onset of collectivisation. They kept cattle, livestock, grew grain, potatoes, beets, vegetables. Several horses helped them in their work. For a long time, my father resisted persuasion to join a unified agricultural cooperative (JZD). After six years of unfulfilled compulsory levies of farm products, fines, threats of imprisonment and the allocation of five hectares of fallow land, he finally signed the JZD and the family lost everything. They were left with a small field, their mother had to join a cooperative, and their father worked as a bricklayer building farm buildings. Josef Kužela entered the bricklayer’s apprenticeship after the burgher school, later he graduated from the industrial school, completed a two-year pedagogical minimum and after the war he joined the construction industrial school in Gottwaldov as a master of vocational training. His work became a hobby, in his spare time he designed houses and worked as a construction supervisor on many building sites in the region. Josef Kužela’s uncle, Patrik Kužela, a deacon of the Dominican Order, was arrested by the Gestapo during the war, tortured and died a martyr’s death in Auschwitz in 1942.