Josef Nedvěd

* 1944

  • “I have to say it was also our Czech land, our old Czech homeland. Why shouldn’t we cheer for our old Czech homeland, since they helped us so much… That’s what I was going through in the organisation, because they helped us a lot, whether that was the asphalt road, the school renovation. […] It would be wrong not to feel good about people who are helping us, and to our old homeland. That’s my intention, I tell myself the village is like a family. We should be together more and together for the village. But under democracy that isn’t how things work, though we don’t have any nastiness, but things could be better here. We aren’t working together, as one. It’s not the same.”

  • “I remember I was already married at the time, it was New Years and I had started work. They sent for me, we were at one hundred and eighty metres, that was the last depth of the shaft, where they drew water. They came for me saying the pipes had burst, I had to leave my wife. I was an employee and they were right, I had to go. So I went down the mine and rode the elevator down, until I was at the sixty, the ninety, the hundred-twenty, when the water passed over me. I was alone in the elevator and thought I was a gonner. The water rushed past me into the elevator and I had no oxygen, but God saved me. I survived and lived to see a pension.”

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    Eibenthal, 06.09.2022

    (audio)
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The Czech land is our old homeland

Josef Nedvěd, Eibenthal - Romania, September 2022
Josef Nedvěd, Eibenthal - Romania, September 2022
zdroj: Post Bellum

Josef Nedvěd was born on 7 September 1944 in the Czech village of Eibenthal in Romanian Banat. His father worked as a miner in the local mines and due to the dusty environment he had to be treated for asbestosis. From his childhood this witness, together with his sister, helped out on their home farm. In Eibenthal, he completed seven grades of school and then learned to be an electrician at the Anina Miner’s Trade School, after which he and the other apprentices had a place ensured in the anthracite mines, where he worked between 1946–1994. After retirement he became Secretary of the local Democratic Association of Czechs and Slovaks for several years. His son left for Bohemia with his family in 1993, where he remains to this day. At the time of recording the witness lived in Eibenthal (October 2022).