Václav Němec

* 1932

  • “After that the coop had been established, but they did it in a way that one of them, he died already, certain Batůněk... They summoned the farmers to the town hall, he would put a gun on the table and say: 'Now you will sign or we will deal with you.' And they were afraid, so they signed. So you can imagine their enthusiasm, having to sign because of fear... So that´s how the coop had started. They would establish it, but just dawdle over it, so nothing good came out of it.”

  • “To force him to join, they would come for him, stating that they need to discuss something. But as they would pick him up, they went north towards Hlinsko and even farther to the KSB – District State Security (Krajská státní bezpečnost) in Pardubice. There he was being interrogated for quite a long time and they were pressing him hard, he never told us how it went, but probably it was like: 'Either you will join or we will move your family out.' That was what they used to do. And there he had our old grandfather at home, our aunt, us boys, well I was away...And he came back a different person. At first, he would go to the barn, as Karel told my mother, and turned on the electricity. But they knew that he wants to kill himself with the electricity, so they would turn it off. And then, as no one was watching... He stood there for days, smoking all the time, and he wrote this autobiography, those three documents: 'These people ruined my life, I can´t live like this, being a nervous wreck...' - as he had lived through a concentration camp and was afraid of things to come. So he went to the attic, put a sack with some grain under his feet and he hung himself.”

  • “In Kamenice, on the 8th of May, Mr Mráz volunteered to serve as a negotiator and he would approach them with the white flag as he spoke good German. And after he stopped the convoy, the commander stated that the village was 'a partisans´ nest'. Then he would make him sit on a car and state his demands. That they will be allowed free passage, that they will not be shot upon and maybe five more points, so after that he went away. But as the convoy was going uphill, reaching the church and the school, the soldiers would wave at them so they would set them free. And there was so much yelling as they were being liberated, and then they got into the cars. But then they learned that on the 5th of May, four Germans were killed, maybe they were Vlasoviets or something, so they forced those four citizens of Rohozné to climb out of from the cars, they would put them against the wall and shoot them. Three of them were shot at the wall, you can still see the holes, now framed, and the fourth one, that certain Mr Novák, had passed out, so they shot him on the ground.”

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Politics is politics, but farmer has to plough the field, to sow and to bring in the harvest

Doing his compulsory military service in Jaroměř; August 1951
Doing his compulsory military service in Jaroměř; August 1951
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Václav Němec was born on August 27th 1932 in Trhová Kamenice to a Catholic family. His grandfather served as a sexton in the local church and Václav was an acolyte as a child. Towards the end of the war, his father, Oldřich Němec, had been arrested with other men from nearby villages for supporting the partisans, and was imprisoned in the Small Fortress in Theresienstadt (Terezín) and in Pardubice. As he came back, a tragedy occurred at the church in Kamenice as retreating Greman soldiers executed four men from nearby village of Rohozné. In 1947, Václav started attending a business school in Hlinsko. His father was a successful farmer. After the war, he wanted to start a grazing cooperative. He had been supporting the idea of united, cooperative farming. However, he had been opposing the establishment of the Soviet-type “kolkhozes” by means of violence, which farmers were forced to join by party officials after 1950. Pressured by the Secret Police (Stb) and fearing further imprisonment, Oldřich Němec committed suicide in 1952. Still, after mounting threats against the farmers, the United Agricultural Coop (JZD) had been established in the village. However, it had performed poorly and later it was made part of the State Farm enterprise (Státní Statek). Even Václav had to join the Kamenice coop while his younger brother, Karel, did his compulsory military service, working as a company economist and an accountant. Later, from 1979 to February 1993, he had been working as a chief accountant and an economist in the United Agricultural Coop Vysočina (JZD Vysočina). He had never been a Communist Party (KSČ) member. Nowadays, he had been living in a house in Trhová Kamenice with his wife, writing the history of his family.