Josef Merhaut

* 1959

  • "I came to work and there was a note on the big door: 'Don't go to work, Ceausesco has fallen, we will be free!' We read it. An engineer walked by, saw the paper and tore it down. There was a great joy, nobody knew what the future was. In Moldava, in the town, people were walking around with a megaphone and they were already shouting, organizing a new leadership and so on... I didn't even manage to get home that day until after midnight. Instead of coming at four o'clock in the afternoon, I came after midnight, and there were celebrations everywhere. Documents were being burned everywhere. What bothered me the most was that some idiot went into the library and burned all the documents about the library. When I took over, I couldn't find anything about the community centre or the library. They burned it outside the building. They were burning documents and communist books everywhere. It was a joy, but today it's not what we thought it would be."

  • "Even my father got into problems with them. He was forbidden to perform music at parties. He played for thirty years at various parties and weddings. Then an official came, I was a little boy, he had high black boots and a ruler that he kept slapping. They threatened my father to destroy him unless he joined the cooperative and became a Communist party member. They pushed him hard, they didn't let him perform music for a while. Then they wouldn't let him buy wood for the winter time. Eventually they succeeded and he signed up. And they let him be. He was still hating them, blaming them. But they didn't push him into anything anymore."

  • "My wife says it was worse for her when she was in school. It was bad for me, but it was even worse for her, she's seven years younger. There was a Holy Mass for her father who died too young - when she was about fourteen years old. She was walking through the gardens to the church and a neighbour lady saw her and told on her. There were some teachers staying at her place. The next day, the teacher whipped her, beat her with a stick for going to church. And in the meantime, her appendix burst. She went to the hospital. It was not caused by her teacher beating her, it was just coincidence. But when she got to the hospital for surgery, the doctors saw that she was beaten up. They asked her who did it to her. She didn't want to say because she was too scared. Finally she said it was her teacher."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Svatá Helena, Rumunsko, 20.10.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 01:18:25
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

Communists threatened my father to destroy him

Josef Merhaut in 1978
Josef Merhaut in 1978
photo: archiv pamětníka

Josef Merhaut was born on 7 March 1959 in Gernik, a Czech village in Banat, Romania. His ancestors came here from Zdice in the Beroun region in the late 1920s. Apart from working in the fields and forests, his ancestors were also great musicians. His father Josef Merhaut Sr. was a local librarian and accordion player and resisted pressure from local communist officials for years. He refused to join both the Communist Party and the agricultural cooperative. But they threatened to destroy him, they forbade him to perform music and refused to sell him wood for the winter. At his father’s request, Josef graduated from the railway high school in Temesvár in 1977 and was subsequently ordered to serve compulsory military service, during which he guarded a refinery building near the town of Konstanz. At the end of his military service, all soldiers were forced to join the Communist Party of Romania. Josef married at the age of 25. As a little girl, his wife Marie was beaten by a Romanian teacher for attending a Holy Mass. From the early 1980s, Josef Merhaut worked as a mechanic in the nearby mines in Nova Moldova. Since the beginning of 1990 he has been employed in Gernik as a librarian and administrator of the community centre (October 2021).