Josef Wawrzacz

* 1956

  • “There was 96 % alcohol and 98 % alcohol. It came in one-liter and half-liter bottles. The half-liter ones were sold the most. And then the small quarter-liter ones. From half a liter one could make a liter and a half of fine spirit. It was sold for a good price. When I did it half a liter cost fifty-five crowns. In the past it may have been thirty-five. People made Vařonka out of it. Caramelized sugar mixed with boiled water and that spirit. When the spirit was mixed with honey, it was called mjodula. The Polish often mixed the alcohol with raspberry syrup. And then it was consumed.”

  • “Then we distributed the alcohol to our customers such as the school boiler operator. He would regularly purchase two or three bottles. Or we would pack it with my mum to bags and travel to Bystřice. Everyone who worked with alcohol had their customers. We needed to build a house and many people did that to improve their situation. Every other house was built on this profit.”

  • “Some Polish people had a field or a meadow on the Czech side of the border and some of our farmers had their estate in Poland. On the border there was a small customs house where a single soldier allowed the farmers across the border based on an agricultural permit. Out of the Hrčava people the Stojaspáls, Haratycs and Kinžors for instance had their fields in Poland. There were quite a number of them. In the morning they harnessed the horses, went across the customs house where they checked them and then went on to the field.”

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    Hlučín, 21.04.2016

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    duration: 01:05:38
    media recorded in project Silesia: Memory of multiethnic Region
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We also got our cow from Poland

Josef Wawrzacz / 1978
Josef Wawrzacz / 1978

Josef Wawrzacz was born on 6 September 1956 in his parents’ cottage in Hrčava on the Polish border in the Silesian Beskids mountain range. His father was employed as an auxiliary train driver with the Czechoslovak State Railways, his mother was a housewife looking after a small farm and three children. Ever since childhood Josef Wawrzacz witnessed smuggling across the Polish border. His family needed money for a new house and therefore his mother traded alcohol smuggled from Poland and Josef helped her with it. Later he himself smuggled electronics, selling it to customers in the Těšín region.