My mother had no milk to feed me, she lost her breast milk after we were deported to Bărăgan
Stáhnout obrázek
Václav Merhaut was born on 27 March 1951 in the Czech village of Gerník in the Romanian Banat as the first-born son of Anna and Karel Merhaut. The family farmed only a few hectares of poorly fertile land. In the autumn months of 1951, they were additionally deported by the Communist Party of Romania to the Bărăgan area east of Bucharest, where more than 40,000 inhabitants of the Romanian-Yugoslav border region, including dozens of Banat Czechs, were relocated. The displaced families, labelled by the authorities as enemies of the state, were placed in the vast fields near the town of Călărași. They lived there in poor conditions and gradually built the village of Ezeru (Cacomeanca Nouă). The Merhauts, together with the Cizler family from Gerník, lived first in a dugout shelter and later in an earth hut . Like other displaced persons, the witness´s parents performed forced manual labour for state enterprises and estates, his mother became seriously ill and his father enlisted in the Romanian army. The Merhauts, unlike the other Gernik families, were able to return from deportation apparently during 1955. In Gerník and in the neighbouring village of Padina Matei, the witness finished school and started working as a bricklayer. He completed his military service as a guard in a prison with political prisoners in the early 1970s. Later he worked in the coal mines and farmed. He was financially compensated by the state for his deportation to Bărăgan after 1989 and has lived in the Czech Republic since 1993. At the time of filming he was living in the Pilsen region (December 2023).
