Josef Kraus

* 1941

  • "If you are bound by a signature, there is no escape. Many people in our country had signed up, including our Prime Minister, and today they keep denying it. It works. But it is always with the knowledge that the signature exists. The fascists have already done that. People who had some trouble during the communist era, so difficult that they threatened to lock them up and send the children to children's homes, offered these people to sign, tell them something sometimes, and move on. In a time of dictatorship, it is quite understandable that they signed it in order to preserve the family. I didn't have such a problem, I said I didn't know much about anyone here, so I would come again, but I was scared. But when I was there for about the fifth time, I found out that it was such nonsense that wouldn't hurt anyone, and that they were idiots. And as President Havel said, then the ones upstairs evaluated it. I was convinced that they were the foot soldiers who were doing the task of conducting a four-hour interrogation with me, and that if I could think of something so as not to hurt anyone, they didn't care. I made a little fun of it later. When I was asked if I saw the movement of foreign troops in Braunschweig as the Americans occupied them, I told them, 'When I went to the swimming pool, I saw an armored car and a jeep behind it.' They pulled out a map there at the State Security office, and I showed them where the swimming pool was in Braunschweig, where I was going, and where the jeep was going. I didn't tell them that the American officers from that crew were going to school with me."

  • "The decisive thing was that then President Svoboda, out of nowhere, or when the communists found that their brains (clever people) were running away, so I was no brain, so two calls came out that people can come back and they would not be punished. I took advantage of this, plus with impunity I received an additional passport, which my wife here issued for me. If it weren't for that, and if she had the desire to come to me with our daughter, I would never return. But this broke me and I was really looking forward to it."

  • "I thought there would be no problem between Yugoslavia and the West. So, I arrived in Belgrade, it was a turning point, there I went to the Swiss and German embassies that I was a refugee. They said, 'Well, he's running from the Bolsheviks,' and they gave me a monthly visa everywhere. So I went to Switzerland, toured the Alps, and ended up in Lucerne, where I checked in at the office and met with about fifty other emigrants. But they were much more famous than me, a sports champion, a ballerina. And it was in every Swiss city, they treated us beautifully. I mostly hitchhiked, even a lady gave me some pills, in case that I could be sick, those people loved us terribly at the time. And when I got off the train in that Lucerne, I was terribly surprised that I wasn't alone, as I said, there were several of us without knowing each other. And there were red carpets, the Czechoslovak flag and anthem were played and they were crying, we were ragged, and the mayor of Lucerne was crying more than all of us."

  • "My first dad was a factory owner, my second dad was a kulak, that's how it turned out for me. It is pretty hard to understood today that I couldn't study. Then I happened to go to an agricultural school, where I was dismissed on a school report day in the second year, explaining: 'Dismissed for personnel reasons.' Who dismissed me? Some local party committee, or who. But a man doesn't take it that way at the age of fifteen or sixteen. So, I went to Semtín to improve my cadres profile (a file with information about one´s class background, one´s views and ideological attitudes), where I worked on shifts for two years. But I did not correct the report, on the contrary, I had a serious injury, a burned leg, I fell into a barrel of asphalt. I got out of Semtín and started, fortunately they allowed it after those years, to study high school in the distance and in the evening. And at the same time play amateur theater. And every cloud has a silver lining. In that Semtín, where I was de facto fully committed, I met my amateur comedian colleagues. And we played under Semtín at the time, which the Bolsheviks probably didn't mind, amateur, community theater."

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    Pardubice, 18.05.2021

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The longing for family, friends and theater brought him back from democracy to totalitarianism

The actor Josef Kraus
The actor Josef Kraus
zdroj: archive of the witness

Josef Kraus was born on February 3, 1941 in Pardubice. His father Jiří Kraus came from a Jewish family and ran a cardboard box factory at the Pardubice chateau. His mother was the daughter of the butcher Wurst from Pardubice. His father did not bear the burden of anti-Jewish regulations, and in September 1942, three months before the transports to Terezín, he took his own life at the age of 39. Josef Kraus‘ mother got married for the second time after the war, she married a farmer from Vysočina, who was being persecuted for a change in the 1950s due to her reluctance to join a collective farm. Josef Kraus was expelled from the second year of the Secondary Agricultural School in Hořice for cadres reasons (a file with information about one´s class background, one´s views and ideological attitudes) . He joined the Semtín factory as a worker, where he, for the first time, became one of the actors in the local amateur theater. Over time, their ensemble became a professional ensemble, but the authorities dissolved it after three years after problems with unwanted satire. For several seasons, Josef Kraus and two colleagues moved to Ostrava, where he performed alongside Jan Kačer and Evžen Němec until the ensemble left for the Drama Club in Prague. Josef Kraus returned to Pardubice, got married and had their first daughter Renata. In August 1968 he emigrated via Romania to Switzerland and later to Germany. After less than three years, he returned from the exile to Czechoslovakia to his family, to which his second daughter, Ester, joined in 1972. After returning from emigration, Josef Kraus had trouble finding a good job, but eventually worked in the Magnet mail order store in Pardubice. He got divorced and remarried, having a second wife, Eva. In 1991, he acquired his grandfather Wurst‘s butcher‘s shop in restitution, and he and his family tried to restore it. The established company was sold in 2011. For more than twenty years, Josef Kraus has been a key member of the Jewish cemetery in Pardubice. In 2021 he lived with his wife Eva in Dukla, Pardubice.