Václav Kodytek

* 1953

  • "Yes, he reminds me and my father of the incident of the arrest. There is a somewhat funny explanation for it, but it is also an explanation about how the policemen worked. When my father was arrested, they noticed a painting of Masaryk on a horse in the room, here I have him with me. At that time, one of them noticed it and said: 'Hey, they have Masaryk here, that's terrible!' But the father reacted sharply and said: "It's Masaryk, but I don't have Masaryk here because of Masaryk, I have him here purely because of the horse. Look at how beautifully built his head is, what a beautiful body he has! I'm just sorry that those hind legs are badly built, that isn't pretty, that's a flaw in the picture, that horse should have had differently built legs.' And by the fact that his father began to explain this matter to him, the policeman completely forgot that it was forbidden to exhibit Masaryk at that time, that he was supposed to confiscate it. He left it hanging on the wall in that room. And thus he remained with us and from that's when my father remembered it when he told me this story. That's why the picture is very valuable to me and I appreciate that we have it. That's why it's in its original form, the way my father had it."

  • "So one day, several cars of State Security came to the farm, it was evening, I remember that they said it was in the evening hours. And they came at him saying that he had weapons, that he should hand them over immediately, that this was not allowed and so on, and they began to search the house. They found nothing in the rooms where they were. So they arrested the father and took him for questioning, and the wife, my mother, remained there. The other policemen continued to search. The father was taken straight to Prague, to Pankrác, where the prison and the court and the authorities around it are known to this day. There they interrogated him for two nights and two days, only gave him water and bread, they didn't give him anything else, and one policeman after another kept changing, and they always wanted to get something out of him that would suggest the fact that he did some anti-state activity, or that he owned weapons. But he didn't admit anything, because he had nothing to admit. In short, they had to end the interrogations."

  • "At that time, it was already happening that there were already soldiers moving around Czechoslovakia who were no longer directly organized. And, among other things, at the end of the Second World War, two soldiers in the forest near my parents, near my father, dug a dugout on the Russian model and started to hide there. Since my father's parents also had a forest nursery in the forest, they went there a lot to work, especially in the spring months. And while they were working in the nursery, the Russian soldiers suddenly were hungry. They somehow they weren't scared, they weren't armed, they weren't mean to them, the Russian soldiers, so the parents weren't scared. Rather, they somehow agreed to bring them some food, and they, the Russian soldiers, went to help them in that forest nursery. To dig trees, to plant, while working in the forest. Their parents would sometimes bring them some food for that, so that they would have something to eat, to eat and to live."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Němčice, 11.03.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 32:42
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Totality must never return

The witness with a picture of President Masaryk, who played an interesting role in his father's story
The witness with a picture of President Masaryk, who played an interesting role in his father's story
zdroj: Archiv PNS

Václav Kodytek was born in 1953 as the third child in the family of farmer Vojtěch Kodytek. At the end of the war, two Soviet soldiers from Bandera group, were hiding in their forest, who helped in the forest nursery for a little food. Some of the neighbors reported them and they were taken away and executed. After 1948, someone reported Vojtěch Kodytek again for allegedly storing weapons. State security searched their house and interrogated him for two days and two nights. The police found nothing in the house and the landowner did not know anything, so he was released. Vojtěch Kodytek was a progressive landowner who studied new methods and improved his farm, he teamed up with two other farmers and bought farm machinery. It worked for them together and they all prospered. So Kodytek thought that it would work similarly in a unified agricultural cooperative, but he was wrong. In 1968, the return of private farming was considered, but after the entry of the Warsaw Pact troops, everything was different. For Vojtěch Kodytek, it was a very hard disappointment and the end of all hopes. He died in 1984 and did not live to see the restitution of the family property after 1989. His son Václav and his family applied for the property. Forests and fields were reclaimed, livestock and machinery were compensated.