Jiří Janičata

* 1946

  • "Those who moved away from there had to make a deposit of a thousand dollars to the national committee. Either two or three thousand had to be deposited in a safe and the houses had to be liquidated or something had to be done about it. Just clean it up somehow. Because as the soldiers were going around these districts in '77 and '88 and liquidating the houses left by the Germans where nobody lived, that was no longer the case. People had to do it at their own expense. Then we demolished it in 1967. By that time I was already out of the military service and in the eighties the Russians came and they finished the liquidation."

  • "Then there was the pub. I remember the pub. I was already teaching in Ostrava when we got there. The Filgas family had already moved somewhere, but the big key was under the shoe shine on the stairs. We unlocked it and we were in the pub. There was the orchestrion, so we dug out a six, threw it in, turned the crank and it played. That still worked."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Šumperk, 07.03.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:44:48
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
  • 2

    Šumperk, 11.03.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:10:09
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Only the chapel remained

Jiří Janičata in 1960 in Ostrava
Jiří Janičata in 1960 in Ostrava
zdroj: archive of a witness

Jiří Janičata was born on 7 October 1946 in Velké Losiny. However, he spent his childhood in the settlement of Annín (Annaberg in German) in Jeseniky, which was settled by people from Wallachia after the German population was displaced. The family lived there until the 1960s on farm No. 107. However, like the other inhabitants of the settlement, they lost their fields during collectivisation and so they moved to nearby Kobyla. People then reportedly had to demolish and dismantle their houses at their own expense. Apart from the remains of the masonry of one of the buildings, the only material monument of the settlement today is the Chapel of St. Joseph. In the 1960s, Jiří Janičata trained in Ostrava for the rolling mills in Nová Huta, where he also took up a job in the local coke plant. During his military service with the railway troops he met his future wife Miloslava Chlupová. They married in 1971 and together they raised their two children Jiří and Eva. After the war, Jiří Janičata returned to Kobyla, where he built a house with his own help in the 1970s. He first worked in a fireclay factory in Vidnava and then worked for Czechoslovak State Railways until his retirement. From 1978 to 1998 he was a people‘s judge, or lay judge in civil disputes. As chairman of the settlement committee, he joined the Communist Party in the second half of the 1980s, from which he resigned in 1990. At the time of the filming in 2023, he was still living in Kobyla nad Vidnavkou.