Josef Loužecký

* 1939

  • “In the 1950s, when jeans were not yet sold here, I got them in a package sent to us once a year by an aunt from America, who had moved there sometime since the 1930s. And because they thought, or maybe they knew, that after the war there was a shortage of all possible stuff, that we probably didn't live a good life, so every year she sent us a big package, mainly with clothes. If there was anything else, I don't know, because the package was always there when we went to the post office to get it, we arrived with a cart, because it was a huge package, so it was always open and searched by our authorities, so maybe there were other things. Well, in one of the packages there was even a full denim suit, meaning a jacket and trousers, and I remember wearing that jacket back in the early 1960s.”

  • "As I was interested in agriculture, one of my grandfathers was a farmer, so I applied to the agricultural school, which at that time was newly built and put into operation in Čáslav, the agricultural and technical school. But at the same time, the active chairman of the MNV, i.e. the local national committee, wanted to establish an united agricultural unit (UAU) and he also wanted my father to give our hectare of field to the UAU. And father said no. Well, the chairman did not hesitate, although I don't know why father said that, because up until that time mother had been going to help the farmers anyway, so she wouldn't have done anything else than what she had been doing up until then, that is, she would have been working in the fields again, as she had done before, but the chairman he was so active and wrote to the Prague factory where my father worked that he was disrupting the socialist order, that he did not want to give, he did not want to join the UAU with our piece of field. And in that factory, they called him to the personnel department and said: 'So you don't want to join the UAU? Well you know what, we'll let you go and go earn a living on that field.' Well, but first of all, my father wasn't interested in agriculture, and secondly, a hectare of field won't feed anyone, so he donated that field to the state and I wasn't allowed to go to agricultural school."

  • "I remember one time, it must have been in the summer or early spring, but I don't know the exact year, if it was 1944 or 1945, we were at Berounka, Černošice is actually on the banks of Berounka. And they came there for some kind of warm-up of the Hitler Youth, or the children, one might say, of the Hitler Youth, who lived almost in our neighborhood in the village in Černošice in an empty villa. And before their physical exercise, they put their equipment and weapons, that is, the belts with the knives, in piles on the shore and ran away at a trot, or at some sort of a run, along the shore. And since my friend Franta was a year older than me, he had more sense about everything, especially about the situation we were in all the time, and he said, come on, let's throw it into the river! So we threw those piles of them with the clothes into the river. When one of them somehow looked back and saw what we were doing, he told the others and they all turned and started running back. Fortunately, they ran far enough away, so we started to run home. I remember yelling all the way, but they didn't run after us because they were busy fishing their stuff out of the river, so luckily we didn't get hurt, they didn't even look for us.'

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    Praha, 15.01.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 54:55
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Because of totalitarianism, he only got into agriculture, which was his great love, in his retirement

Josef Loužecký serving in the army
Josef Loužecký serving in the army
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Josef Loužecký was born on December 26, 1939 in Lešany near Benešov to a family of a mechanical locksmith. In September 1942, the family was ordered to move out of Lešan in order to establish a training area for SS units. Together with one family, they went from a neighboring village to Černošice, where they lived in a servant‘s house near the rectory. After the war, they moved back to Lešan, where Josef started elementary school. After that, he wanted to go to the newly built agricultural and technical school in Čáslav, because his father refused to donate his hectare of field to the local JZD and preferred to donate it to the state, he was not allowed there. So he graduated from an electrical engineering school in Prague and began making a living as a designer of electrical machines at ČKD in Modřany. Between 1958 and 1960, he completed his military service in Ostrava as a radar operator for the air defense of the state. He got married in 1962 and had four children with his wife. They moved together to Podělus and so that he did not have to commute all the way to Prague every day, he managed to get a place in Jawa in nearby Týnec nad Sázavou. He worked there until 1968, when he took advantage of the liberalization of small business and established a trucking company. However, after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, conditions quickly changed for the worse, and he had to close the trucking business again in 1970. He worked as a designer or locksmith in various companies, from 1981 he worked as a garage foreman in a construction company until the beginning of the 90s, when the company was liquidated. In November 1989, he and his wife took part in a demonstration on Wenceslas Square and later bore the brunt of the division of Czechoslovakia. Between 1994 and 2011, he taught technical subjects at the Integrated High School in Benešov. In 2022, he lived in Podělusy near Týnec nad Sázavou, near his native Lešany.