Karel Mráz

* 1940

  • „In the 1990‘s, actually the Germans and Austrians would come to look at us. And that’s what I’m intending to say, they would come to look at us. They were interested in our way of life. And let me tell you, when the former inhabitants came, they would come as well even though it was their parents, and them as children [who moved away], they came from Austria to check the cow stalls to have a peek. I don’t speak German but there’s always a way to make ourselves understood. And then we agreed that they were envious of our work in the cow stalls. Because they had farms and we just tended to the cows. And when we explained that we worked in shifts, that I work one shift in the morning, then, next day, in the afternoon, and every other Saturday and on Sundays, I don’t work at all, they couldn’t understand it. They would say: ‘But we have to do all that every day. Morning, evening, fieldwork during the day. So when you finish here, you go and work in the fields, right?’ And I said: ‘No, we only raise cows, we don’t go to the field.’ - ‘And who then works in the fields?’ And I said: ‘Well… the field workers are there.’ They… They would like this. Everyone who worked in agriculture would get it.”

  • „At that farm which my dad had taken over in some way, they had a horse. And dad would drive the expelled folk from Horní Planá to Zvonková to tje customs’ office. Here in Horní Planá, under the council building, there was the town scales (it was this large underground scale and there was a booth) and that’s what I remember, how people assigned for expulsion gathered there. Well, assigned, some were assigned and some went voluntarily and those were in majority because they were scared what would they do, what would happen to them here among the Czechs, whether they would be able to live in peace here. So I remember that everyone carried a bundle, they usually took their duvets so that they would have somewhere to sleep. Or something to sleep on. Or under. So they weighed those bundles. We would go and watch as kids. They could take thirty kilos each so the bundles were 30 kilos. They placed it on the cart and then walked past the cart to the [Austrian] border. There, the bundles were unloaded and we went back. I was there with my dad maybe twice. And there was this thing that fascinated me, when we were crossing the river on the bridge, it was an iron bridge, they [Germans] wanted to tear it down but they did not manage, they only tore down the central support and the bridge was bent, so one drove to the bridge like this towards the water and then upwards.”

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    Horní Planá, 24.06.2021

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We lived really well, we did not need anything else

Karel Mráz, 2021
Karel Mráz, 2021
photo: Post Bellum

Karel Mráz was born on the 13th of December in 1940 in Žárovná in the Prachatice region. When he was five, his parents, along with several other families from the small community of Žárovná had the opportunity to get houses which had belonged to the former [German-speaking] inhabitants who were to be expelled, and they moved to Horní Planá in the Český Krumlov area. Until around the end of 1946, they share the house with its owners and the German family grandma helped Karel’s mother with childcare. At the end of 1946, the former owners had to leave the town, some of the expelled families were taken by a horse cart to Zvonková to a border crossing with Austria by Karel and his father. Karel Mráz was born as the eighth of twelve children. In the middle of the 1950‘s, he apprenticed with the Vojenské lesy [Army Forests]. At first, he got a job removing timber during the construction of the Lipno dam, later, he worked at a… as a handler and later as a lorry driver. Between 1965 and 1990, he lived in Volary where he got a job in a timber processing company and he was assigned a company flat as well. In 1990, he and his family moved back to his parents’ house in Horní Planá where he worked in an agricultural cooperative and for the State Forests. In 2021, Karel Mráz lived in Horní Planá.