Alois Klepáček

* 1943

  • "We arrived there in May [June] and by November 400 houses had been built, at the suggestion of the Czechs. They thought they would first make bricks, then to dry them and then brick the walls, but they couldn't make it. When they took it like that, at once... the "truplovina", material of clay, by the time winter came, they had 400 houses built."

  • "All I know is that I was woken up, it was in the night. They woke me up at midnight to start packing and moving. They said, 'Take what you can, what's yours. And don't worry about who's taking it to the railway!' They arrived and everything went like clockwork, all lined up: who, where and when. They had to take us from St Helena, we were like on a hill. So from there they gathered us towards the Danube, where the road was."

  • "They were driving us us from the train to [Ezer's] place of residence. The grain was not yet ripe, and they had already cut it down, and they were marking the places for the streets and wells. They said, 'From here to here is your house and take care of it.' It was 12 meters wide and 40 meters long, that was our property when they dropped us off in Cãlãrasi. That's where the train took us, to Cãlãras. At that time they realised that they were not going to take us to Russia, as was rumored, but that they needed us to work in Romania, to grow cotton. The women and children were on the cotton plantations, and the men who knew a little bit of crafts, they were taken on by the companies that built the dwellings."

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    Cheb, 09.11.2023

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In Bărăgan, I shuffled my feet to keep them from being pierced by thistles

During the apprenticeship, Temesvár, 1963
During the apprenticeship, Temesvár, 1963
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Alois Klepáček was born on 29 April 1943 in the village of Svatá Helena in the Romanian Banat. He grew up in a farming family of nine and was involved in farm work from childhood. In June 1951, the Klepáček family, including their relatives (the Kovaříks), were deported to the Bărăgan region, where the Romanian Communist Party displaced politically unreliable people. The deportees had to leave their homes within a few hours and were allowed to take only a few personal belongings with them. The authorities dropped them off in an unpopulated area without any resources, and they were not allowed to leave the area, suffering above all from a lack of food. Over the following months, they built the settlement of Ezeru (Cacomeanca Nouă), one of the 18 newly created villages. Alois Klepáček started second class there, and his other siblings studied or worked for the state farm, just like their parents. In 1955, Alois Kovařík, a cousin of the witness, died in Ezer. In February 1956, the memorial family was able to return to St. Helena, finding the farm looted and vandalized. Later, the witness trained and worked as a welder. His deteriorating health and the lack of medicine for his sick wife forced him to leave with his family for Czechoslovakia and he also renounced his Romanian citizenship. In December 1976, they managed to reach Czechoslovakia and settled in Cheb, where the witness still lives (March 2024). Due to the loss of his Romanian citizenship, he did not receive compensation from the state after 1989 for his deportation in the 1950s.