They imprisoned him for ten years. My uncle feared the same fate and preferred to slash his wrists
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Antonín Procházka was born on 20 April 1929 in Kroužek, a part of the village of Rousínov in the Vyškov region. His father, born in 1895, trained in Vienna as a shop assistant. During the World War I he ended up in Russian captivity on the Eastern Front. The witness grew up with his brother and parents in the village of Hlubočany, where his father was sent to serve as a policeman. The village was part of the so-called Vyškov language island, which was the smallest German-speaking enclave in former Czechoslovakia. After the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, he and his parents moved to Nížkovice, where he experienced the liberation by the Soviet army in April 1945. He had already been training as a tailor at the school founded by Arnošt Rolný in Prostějov. He started working at OP (clothing company) Prostějov and in 1948 the company sent him to Varnsdorf in northern Bohemia to set up warehouses. Subsequently, he continued to do so in Liberec. In 1954 he got married. He worked as an accountant in the company. In 1957 he was arrested and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment for alleged fraud, and ordered to pay compensation. He spent five and a half years in prison in the Vojna labour camp near Příbram and in Pankrác prison. He first saw his son Jaroslav Procházka when he was three years old. The son later became a record holder in lifting beer barrels. The witness lived through the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops on 21 August 1968 in Liberec. In 2022, he was living in a senior home in Hrádek nad Nisou.
